Did I play catch with my dad? It seems like a pretty simple question, but I don’t know.
The genesis of this process was a Facebook post from a guy in my neighborhood. He never “got ” Field of Dreams. In the movie, Ray (Kevin Costner) is in his cornfield and hears a voice saying, “If you build it, they will come.” He does, and soon, Shoeless Joe and his old teammates return to play baseball again.
Someone opined: “At the heart of the story, it’s about a man reconciling his fraught relationship with his now deceased father. It’s about forgiveness and understanding, and the vehicle for his catharsis is baseball.” There is that. “Shoeless Joe was his dad’s favorite player and needed his redemption, along with the rest of the 1919 White Sox. The Field of Dreams allowed them all to experience that.” Okay.
But, I said, “I don’t think you need to know the Black Sox scandal to appreciate it, though it helps to appreciate baseball.” And maybe you don’t even need that.
I was touched when the doctor saved Ray’s daughter, abandoning his baseball dreams for the greater good. “Defying the threat of foreclosure, Ray listens to the once-cynical, worn-down Terence’s (James Earl Jones) dreamy prediction.”
Every. Single. Time.
When Ray plays catch with his dad, I cry every damn time. Every. Damn. Time.
Yet, I cannot remember whether my father and I played catch, yea or nay. My sisters could not give me a definitive response.
My dad and I attended minor league baseball games in the Binghamton, NY, area, seeing the Triplets. However, he worked nights at IBM in the mid-1960s, so I tended to go to games with my grandfather, McKinley. Dad and I also saw a New York Yankees game at the old Stadium when they beat the Washington Senators, 4-3, quite possibly on July 21, 1962. (I remember the score and the opponent.)
I saw Field of Dreams when it first came out in 1989, when my dad was still alive. Since he died in 2000, I know there are questions I would have liked to have asked about his childhood, his relationship with McKinley, his time in the military, and many other things. It’s a sentimental movie; my father’s passing makes it feel more so.
Leslie Harold (Les) Green died a quarter of a century ago.
Yeah, that line–“Hey, Dad? Wanna have a catch?”–is an instant tear-jerk, isn’t it? That movie came out the spring before I went to college…in Iowa. There was quite a bit of cynicism out there regarding the whole “Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa!” thing at the time. Quite a bit of eye-rolling. I didn’t see the movie until my sophomore year, and I loved it instantly. When The Wife and I were first dating, she actually took me to the Field of Dreams, in Dyersville IA, which at the time wasn’t built up much at all and it looked just like it did in the movie. Alas, I went nowhere when I wandered out into the outfield corn…except into the corn.