Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
ENGLEWOOD - Ginny Fay doesn't remember much about Hurricane Charley.
She sometimes doesn't remember that she and her son are sleeping on the floor of a middle school cafeteria, or that their Punta Gorda mobile home is gone.
But Fay, 88, remembers golf.
Playing golf. Teaching golf. Thinking golf.
"I play a mental game," she says with a sniff of authority. "The game has stayed with me all these years."
Fay started playing in Massachusetts when she was 8, and became one of the country's first women to teach golf professionally. She taught lessons from her mobile home until a few years ago, when strokes and old age confined her mostly to a sitting position.
And now, her home is gone. So are the photos of Fay in the 1930s, posing with a club while wearing a skirt down to her ankles and a modest top on an all-women's college campus. The yellowing newspaper clips have probably also blown away.
But in this temporary shelter for Charley's victims, Fay is smiling because she is doing what she loves. "Keep your head straight," Fay tells a man who is about her age. He is holding a white cane upside down, like a golf club. Another man holds a pink towel in both hands and rotates his torso.
To make her point, Fay lifts her body from her motorized scooter. She slowly grabs a seven-iron from the scooter's basket and holds it firmly in her gnarled hands. She looks like she might fall, but her voice is steady.
"Learn to be conscious of the tensions in your swing," she tells the man. A few others are standing near, listening. They are rapt.
Her son, Doug Fay, watches from a few feet away. "When she has a chance to teach, her mind comes alive," said Doug, 55. "With golf, she's clear as a bell."
But Fay is a little foggy about other events. She sometimes calls Doug "my husband," even though he has been dead for years. And sometimes, she's not sure if her home is in Port Charlotte or Massachusetts, where she reigned on the green decades ago.
Like thousands of others in Charlotte County, the pair has nowhere else to go. Fay sometimes remembers what brought her here to L.A. Ainger Middle School. On Thursday, she and her son fled from their home after the first evacuation order. They went to one shelter in Port Charlotte for two nights, then were moved to another shelter about 20 miles away in Englewood.
They had $2, in Fay's pocket, some clothes, Fay's scooter, and of course, her golf bag.
And so now they wait, with the hundreds of others. Some play cards. Others sit silently, obviously upset. And others want to talk to Fay about golf. Just the memories of better days in Florida, of long, sunny games on a tidy green course, are enough to get them through this day.