18 November 2020
Maybe “haunts” is too strong of a word. Lingers. Let’s say Field of Dreams lingers on for me in some far-back, far-away kind of ever-present sense.
Here’s why:
What Ray does is all perceived as some kind of crazy dream. But it isn’t that crazy at all to build something a stranger asks you to.
It’s biblical. Proverbial. It’s generosity—in the most profound sense of the word.
Or maybe not generosity, exactly, because Ray wants to learn what will come if he builds it.
The baseball field, that is. Smack in the middle of a good crop of corn.
I don’t know. If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s the gist.
Corn comes up. Ray builds a field. A nice one, too.
Ray and Terence (an old famous writer, a recluse) make their way across the country to find the kid who used to be a doctor and never got to play in the majors.
(Something in itself there that sticks with me, too.)
Then there’s Shoeless Joe. His regret. And all the dead legends with wooden bats glad to be swinging and spitting again.
And then there’s the quiet man who plays Ray’s father.
Here’s where you find out why you’ve watched the movie in the first place.
It’s all for Ray’s game of catch with the ghost of his father who doesn’t know Ray is his kid, the kid who will some day dream alive a kind of heaven in the middle of Iowa.
One game of catch.
It takes the whole movie to see it: Have a moment when you can.
Writing from Here 