Board Games and Baseball

At the other end of my childhood I can remember my senior year in high school. My mom was the creative type. Among her many creations was an oversized chess board. She had taken an old round coffee table and covered it in squares of white and black faux leather in the center. The edges she upholstered in the black material with batting underneath to make the edges puffy. It sounds odd, and it probably was, but we had this large chess board in the living room. I’m not sure how it started, but for several months during my senior year my stepfather and I played chess, sometimes in stretches of several nights in a row. We hardly communicated in any other way. But we played chess. I think it became a way of measuring myself against him as I worked to win. Those weren’t exactly fun times, but they were times when I wasn’t uncomfortable around him.

Between kindergarten and senior year in high school there are very few positive memories of my dad being around. I competed in speech competitions and he never came to a single one. I played football, I wrestled, I was in school plays and I don’t remember him coming to a single thing. We never went fishing together. We never played catch that I recall.

Regarding that, one of the most powerful movies ever produced, in my opinion, is Field of Dreams. It presents itself as a baseball movie but it’s really a movie about fathers and sons. I went to see that movie in the theater with my good friend Wally. His father was also absent in his childhood. The two of us grown men sat sobbing in the theater touched by the story of a son estranged from his father. To this day when Kevin Costner meets his dad on that field in Iowa and says, “want to have a catch?” I break into tears. I never had a catch with my dad. Either one of them.