Three hours west of Chicago, in rolling-hill country, there is little to guide you to the field, no GPS icon, no large signs or posters, just a small wooden plank nailed to a phone pole, reading “FOD” and pointing down a long gravel driveway that ends near the generic white clapboard farmhouse that is home to this major-league- like baseball field.
If you’ve seen the film, the scene is instantly recognizable, and the aura of the movie immediately enfolds you. There on the field were perhaps a dozen visitors like us, all shapes, sizes and ages, mingling, throwing and hitting the ball around, as if they had known each other forever.
We easily blended into the group, three generations of us, wiling away the better part of an afternoon—batting, throwing and catching baseballs—totally absorbed in this little corner of the world that exudes the magic that has made baseball endure as our national pastime for almost two centuries.
As we travel through life we all collect in our memory a few moments or events that often, for no apparent reason, pop into our mind.
They may not be the most important times of our life, but for some reason they remain with us, visiting our awareness from time to time even when uninvited.
Normally we cannot predict which bits and pieces of our consciousness will don this cloak of importance, but I am certain that my time on the Field of Dreams will never be deleted from my cache of memorable experiences.
I have always been a sports nut, and though I never pushed them, my sons have followed suit. And knowing my reverence for the game of baseball, they took me to what could be considered a symbolic mecca of the sport, a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield, created, as the story goes, by a farmer who saw the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson in his field with the words “if you build it they will come” wafting through the sky overhead.
Despite derisive remarks from his wife, the farmer builds a beautiful ball diamond, and sure enough, the ghosts of the baseball icons of the past show up to play ball.
Those ghosts have now become ordinary folks like us who drive to Dyersville from every corner of the country to witness this scene and “have a catch” with their kids and their dads and their grandpas.
Returning home, my mind was full of countless thoughts and feelings triggered by this simple excursion. When we look back over our lives as parents, we remember first the early years when the kids needed us in a survival sense. The closeness of those times begins to fade as their dependency wanes, and it is then that we must strive to keep it alive, lest it vanish forever.
So have a catch tonight with your kids, and tomorrow night too. Maybe after they sew their oats they will come to you some day and ask you to join them on a trip to your magic Field of Dreams.
And when it happens, don’t be fooled into thinking that they are taking you there because of their love of the game. When the time comes, you will feel the real reason for the journey.
