You Wanna Have A Catch?

I watched Field of Dreams again with my kids tonight. It's one of my favorite movies. It's a favorite movie of a lot of fathers.

A few years ago, my sons and I visited the site where they made the film. It's in the middle of nowhere, really. We went with my best friend and his three sons, the same ages as mine, more or less.

Driving along the Mississippi in the Midwest in July you see eagles and river towns and most of all corn. We stopped a few times to get gas or something to eat, but mostly we drove. We saw hills of corn and valleys of corn and fields of corn and more corn than you can imagine. Finally we reached Dubuque and our motel and concrete.

For dinner we went to Galena, Illinois and in the morning to the Mississippi River Aquarium. Both of them are nice as far as such things go. Then we went to Dyersville, the home of Field of Dreams.

There's a lot more corn in and around in Dyersville and we drove through most of it. We had lunch in a small café in town, meat loaf, pork chops, milk, potatoes. Then we drove to the field.

It is what it looks like on film. The house and the lights, the bleachers and the baseball diamond. There's no charge to get in, but there's a gift booth of course and we spent our money easily, buying hats and magnets and a copy of the brilliant book that is the basis for the movie.

Then we had a catch, two fathers and six kids. Had a catch, ran the bases, walked the outfield. There were only a few other visitors on this perfect summer day under a hot sun with the corn more than knee high. The boys ranged in age from six to eleven and they were happy just to be outside. So were my friend and I, and we stopped sometimes to watch them running across the grass, and we laughed with them even though it was sometimes hard to breathe as we saw our sons growing up and away from us.