TheBanyanTree: A Field of Dreams Story

[Pam North]

*That* gave me goose bumps, and was uplifting to read!!!!

I love baseball; 'Dreams' rates right up there with the few favorite movies
I can watch over and over (including 'Sandlot'!); and I'm also at a point in
my life where I'm 'taking the next step', and reconnecting where there has
been no connections for a long time.  And some of those connections are with
myself.

Thank you for sharing this....

Pam




On 3/3/07, A. Christopher Hammon <chris at oates.org> wrote:
>
> As I prepare to lead an online seminar that we do on "Baseball, Ghosts,
> and Field of Dreams: A Journey Toward Wholeness," I have realized in the
> midst of reviewing the stories I tell as part of this seminar that there
> are some that I have not gotten around to sharing here. The seminar
> starts on Monday and lasts three weeks, but since it is online and I can
> do my thing from anywhere, I'm headed to Phoenix mid-week to visit
> siblings and catch a few Spring Training games. I just have to gather up
> my stories and move them to the laptop to travel with me.
>
> Anyway, here is one of my "dad" stories in celebration of the beginning
> to the baseball season:
>
> I have a baseball sitting on my desk at home that I enjoy picking up and
> holding in my hand every so often. Feeling the weight of the ball in my
> hand and rotating through various grips is a spiritual experience for me
> ... carrying me back to the joy of many summer days as a youth, back to
> learning lessons of risk and courage as a young person with the
> recognition that failing only 7 times out of 10 when you step into the
> batter's box will land you in the Hall of Fame, and back to learning
> lessons of balance in life and the value of passing a summer evening
> doing nothing more than watching a ball game with a friend. As my
> fingers slide over the horsehide and caress the stitches, moving from
> fastball to curve to split-finger, dreams and visions seem to tumble
> forth in  stories, memories, and whispers of imagination.
>
> When I first saw the film, /Field of Dreams/, it was on the big screen
> and I was in the midst of putting in the long hours and taking the
> entrepreneurial risks of a video project called /The Waters of Mount
> Desert Island/. At that time I was really caught up in the theme of
> going the distance to recognize one's dreams ... no matter how far
> fetched they may seem. When I started receiving phone calls related to
> the video project I thought I had built my field of dreams ... hospitals
> ordered it ...  including  Mayo Clinic, Walter Reed, Massachusetts
> General, Scott and White, Cleveland Clinic. I had "bet the family farm,"
> so to speak, to make this thing and people were coming. And then L.L.
> Bean called and invited me to do several screenings and video signing
> there; which, by the way, was a real ego rush and a lot of fun.
> Unfortunately, in the end not enough people came and we did lose the farm.
>
> In the ensuing mid-life crisis this film continued to haunt me as it
> wove in and out of the ghosts of my past, especially as I faced my own
> "good enough" issues and a growing anger over the abandonment by my dad
> during my childhood years. It was a difficult journey for discovering
> that I needed to look within rather than everywhere else.
>
> Bicycles and baseball were a way of life for me as a child growing up
> out in the southwest. In the part of Phoenix where I grew up we did not
> have Little League or any other forms of adult organized sports.
> Instead, we had a bunch of us that were always ready to bicycle out to
> the open spaces that surrounded us then to play ball. How many of us
> turned up there at any given time determined what we played; catch,
> three flies up, work-up, ball games with ghost runners. And when no one
> else was around, I would throw a ball against the carport wall to play
> catch with myself. Not a day went by that didn't include baseball --
> winter, summer, it didn't matter.
>
> Unlike Ray Kinsella's experience in the story, however, my dad never did
> come out into the yard to have a catch. Mostly, he was never around, but
> this was a big deal for me because it most symbolized his absence from
> being part of my life.
>
> In the mid-1990's, still in the midst of mid-life crisis, my anger with
> my dad boiled over and I set out to write a story on, "I Never Played
> Catch With My Father." It was a time in my life that I was doing a lot
> of storytelling (and some of those stories are still hanging around out
> on the Web). This story was full of hurt and bitterness and feelings of
> being unblessed. It was a story fully intended to hurt even though I
> never expected him to read it, but it was everything I wanted to say to
> him if our paths should ever cross -- even though I didn't even know
> whether he was still alive. But it is a story I could never finish.
> There was too much stuff connected to it, and in the midst of trying to
> write this expression of refusing to forgive, I discovered that
> forgiving someone isn't something you do for him or her but something
> you do for yourself. I set the attempted manuscript off to the side of
> the road, along with a lot of other baggage, and moved on.
>
> A few years later an incredible journey began. I was in the midst of
> building another field of dreams awash in the blessings of another
> father-figure who had himself grown up without a father.  I was serving
> as the project director and lead developer for taking the Wayne Oates
> Institute online; which included hosting online conferences, publishing
> an online journal, and starting to republish a selection of Wayne's 58
> books. Wayne Oates was a renowned scholar, prolific author, and the
> person who coined the term "workaholic." He was also one of my teachers
> and mentors, and I was now part of continuing his legacy. He died in
> October 1999, shortly after I had been called back home from vacation.
>
> Two days after Wayne Oates' memorial service, I drove over to Illinois
> for the memorial service of a beloved aunt. I had arranged to meet my
> sister at a restaurant in Champaign before driving on down to spend the
> night at a friend's. My siblings and I had all gone our separate ways as
> we each left home, and generally we only crossed paths for funerals. I
> was working on building some bridges, though, and had started meeting my
> sister for dinner any time I was in the area.
>
> My sister walked into the restaurant that evening accompanied by an old
> man in a beat up leather bomber jacket and baseball cap with air tanker
> pilot pins stuck all over it. My dad spent his life fighting forest
> fires by converting and flying old World War II bombers as air tankers
> (if you have seen the film, /Always/, you've got the picture). And there
> I was face to face with my dad again for the first time in 20 years and
> only the second in more than 30. He had heard that I was planning to go
> up for my aunt's memorial and he caught a flight back to Illinois with a
> friend of his out in Phoenix.  The question that flashed through my mind
> was, "Had I left enough stuff by the road over the past few years to do
> this?"
>
> I discovered that I had and I was able to just be with him without
> having to deal with all of the stuff of the past. Then as we got
> together over brunch at the end of the weekend, he mentioned that he had
> watched the story on Wayne Oates' obituary on /CBS Sunday Morning/
> before coming to meet us. He was the only person in my family to be
> aware of Wayne's death and the significance of that for me. He was the
> last person I expected to have any knowledge of my life. As we talked on
> I was surprised to learn that he was current on the important things
> going on in my life, but even more significant to me, I discovered that
> he had read every story I had published over the previous ten years.
>
> It was a first step and the next spring I decided I was ready to go the
> next. I made arrangements to go visit my brother who was still out in
> Phoenix and called my dad to see if I could join him for breakfast at
> the airport when I got there (my dad had breakfast every morning at the
> café at the airport where his hanger was located -- it's a pilot thing).
> I had no idea what to expect, I just knew that I needed to make the
> journey.
>
> I never did play catch with my dad but we talked a lot of baseball over
> those next few years, along with sharing a lot of stories. We even took
> in a few games together at his hometown Diamondback Stadium. He is gone
> now, but when I pick up a baseball I still hear the whisper in the wind,
> "if you build it, he will come."
>
> Cheers,
> Chris
>
>