TheBanyanTree: I Never Played Catch with my Father

[Pam Lawley]

Wow.  Really  loving story Chis - thank you so much for sharing it!!

And it's true - forgiving others is for us.

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 10:39 AM, A. Christopher Hammon <chris at oates.org>wrote:

> 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.
>