TheBanyanTree: I Never Played Catch with my Father

[A. Christopher Hammon]

I can't remember if I have shared this with the group or not. I 
originally wrote it for a seminar on mid-life transitions. If I have, we 
can blame it on my chemo-brain (it is a good all-around excuse). But it 
is Father's Day, and I have been thinkin about my dad this week in light 
on the fires out west -- part of the reason he was rarely around when I 
was growing up was because he was fly air-tankers fighting forest fires 
a good bit of the year. So here's to the memories of my dad....

I Never Played Catch With My Father

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 also back to 
learning lessons of balance in life, including the value of passing a 
summer evening 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, or 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 and shared 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."



Happy Father's Day all,
Chris


PS: I will be spending this evening at the ballpark with a friend.