Just Like Me

"I only saw him years later, when he was worn down by life.  Look at him. He's got his whole life in front of him, and I'm not even a glint in his eye."  "Ray Kinsella" from Field of Dreams.

In a movie full of famous quotes ("Ray, people will come Ray,") this wasn't one of Kevin Costner's most memorable lines, but it's one that has resonated with me tonight.  To put the quote above in its proper context, Kevin Costner plays a character named Ray Kinsella, a man with many regrets in his life, but none bigger than breaking off his relationship with the father that didn't understand him.  His father dies before he could make up with him, and from somewhere deep within, Ray hears a voice.  This voice convinces him to build a baseball field of all things, then take an Odyssey into the unknown, a path wrought with strain of every kind imaginable until he stands face-to-face with his father-- that is the younger version of his father who, like many other ghosts of baseball past, have found their way onto Ray's baseball field for a second chance.


So as he stands down the basepath staring at his father, overcome with emotion, he has a revelation that his father wasn't always... old. 

My own dad told my brother and me, when we were old enough to start thinking seriously about getting into trouble, that whenever we had a stupid thought run through our heads, to think better of it, because whatever trouble we were thinking of getting in, he had already done it.  Dad rarely got into specifics, but it was a message that was usually well-received, sometimes shrugged off, and from time-to-time ignored completely.

You see, I only knew Dad from the time he was 25 until his passing this fall at the too-early age of 61.  When you figure in eleven years of my growth from infancy, by the time my brain started telling me it was okay to run down to the creek in mid-January and use a shovel to bust the ice to go ice fishing, my dad was 36 years old.  That is, old enough to have little desire to repeat youthful indiscretions.

Just like me.

The Dad I knew was Army-hardened.  He was faithful, never skipping a day of work.  He was tired at the end of the day because he put in his all.  But he still had time to play Superman: play catch with us out in the yard, coach our little league team, take us hunting and fishing.  When he did any of this though, wisdom flowed from his few words.  Everything had a lesson behind it.  Everything was spoken from a mentor's point-of-view.  Dad wasn't a hell raiser.  He drove us around in a station wagon and Old Blue, his 1974 Chevy pickup, and took his time in doing so.  He rarely got excited, rarely let his emotions show, never acted immature.

Pretty much just like me.

So when he gave us the vague warnings about his experiences, I, as I assume my brother did as well, let it slip in one ear and out the other.  Boldness led to wrecklessness.  Knuckleheadedness prevailed, and I turned from a boy to an adolescent who needed to see why the green slime on a lake's spillway is slick.  Why you don't point a bb gun at a girl's foot (sorry Kelda.)  Why you don't roll a tire down 5th Street hill into traffic.  Why you don't egg and shaving cream the back of a church.  Why you don't try to catch a Mississippi Kite with a fishing pole.

I had never truly believed that Dad was just like me. 

Tonight Providence brought to me one of Dad's childhood friends.  In town on a business trip, this gentleman who referred to my Dad as his older brother, had lived next door to Dad growing up.  He was able to relay some stories about Dad that I was never to see in the man I looked up to.  About him playing Huck Finn with a borrowed rowboat and capsizing on the Arkansas River.  About stealing watermelons and blasting fish from the water with M-80s.  Fast cars and football.  Basically all the things that I would have done (and some of which I did do) when I was a kid, trying to learn the ways of this world.

Though it still hurts, and though I know I will never completely get over the loss, it does help bring a smile to my face to know that Dad was just like me.