The Natural
If you like baseball and if you like Robert Redford, I would hope that you’ve seen the movie The Natural. It’s a 1984 classic that has a great supporting cast with Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Bassinger, Barbara Hershey, and Wilford Brimley. It tells the faintly Twilight Zone-like story of a rookie who has an athletic gift (embodied in a magical bat hewn from the timber of a lightning-struck tree that somehow symbolizes the boy’s father). He has an incident on his train trip to the major leagues that derails his life for some fifteen years or so and his baseball talent gets mysteriously laid aside (and is never really explained). The story bears an eerie resemblance to Field of Dreams, not just because its about the great American sport, but because it all happens in a vaguely inexplicable twilight zone. These types of illogical, fantastical stories should not appeal to me, but they somehow do. I like logic and resolution. I like my stories rational and grounded in reality, and these two are not. They both have main protagonist stars that I admire (Redford and Costner) and ensemble characters I think we all love (James Earl Jones and Wilford Brimley). A lot of people don’t like Costner, but I very much do. Most people quietly like Redford and I have no problem saying I will always watch his movies. They are both men that I wish I had been more like in my youth. There is no greater nemesis of my youth the Hubble Gardner in The Way We Were. It’s strange that while Redford was on set starring in The Natural, Costner was playing the unseen suicide victim, Alex, who gave rise to The Big Chill and had the more chilling outcome of ending up on the cutting room floor.
What I think I like most about The Natural and Field of Dreams is their titles. They are both so evocative and deep. They tell the entire story without any of the details and yet they are both about the hardship of sons who have unresolved issues with their fathers. I don’t think I ever cried so much at the end of a movie as I did at the end of Field of Dreams when John Kinsella asks his son Ray to have a catch. Roy Hobbs, who’s father has a sudden heart attack, loses his baseball mentor as well and is left with only his oak “Wonderboy” bat as a reminder. Ray Kinsella finds resolution in his field of dreams and perhaps Roy Hobbs finds his in knowing that his son (sired sixteen years before in the hayloft in Iowa with Glenn Close) has been able to see him triumph in the big leagues and attain his dream.
I am fortunate. I had the opportunity thirty years ago to resolve my issues with my father at his grave site. My father basically abandoned me when I was four (as well as my mother and sisters…and then his following wife and daughters…and what is still a growing list of children from women wed and unwed over the years…total child count now stands at nine confirmed). I didn’t meet my father again until I was eight (when he did, indeed take me to a Dodgers game), and after that when I was seventeen and after that when I was twenty-eight. I saw him one more time when I was thirty-five when I introduced him to my oldest son (then seven). It was not the reconciling moment it could have been, he basically ignored my son in favor of trying to use me and my Wall Street status to promote his own interests while ignoring his grandson. I have often thought that he could do nothing to hurt me. I was immune. But ignoring my son the first and only time he ever met him was as hurtful as anything I could ever imagine. My resolution finally came through the forgiveness of a son for a father when I took care of his funeral arrangements, gave the eulogy and paid for the affair regardless of the long list of things he never did for me or, worse yet, the broken promises. A more graceful moment I have never known.
I have also reasoned that I owe my father a great deal because his cautionary tale has led me to both solid career success and, much more importantly, a strong need to be a father unlike him to all of my children. There is no better gift he could have given me than the motivation to be there for my kids and to stand by my children, no matter what. Nothing I have done in life makes me more proud than that simple act that should come naturally to us all, but is more elusive than it should be. I have many friends that are equally good fathers as me, but not so many who have turned their own loss into their children’s gain.
Being a good father from a distance is itself a challenge. I thought hard about moving out here to California with my kids all still in New York (one now mostly in Delaware). That happened pre-Pandemic and my argument was that five hours on a plane was not so different from the Florida norm of being three hours away by plane. Little did I know that we would go sixteen months between face-to-face visits. But we have gotten through it and I feel that my rapport with all three of my kids (as is always the case, they are all three very different and need very different things from me) is strong. I long ago rationalized that I could have been in Manhattan and not seen them for sixteen months with the Pandemic raging, but that is only somewhat plausible. Kim and I are flying back to NYC in early September, making it a mere two months since we’ve seen them last in Ithaca. When we moved here, we figured we would be back every two months or so, which I guess implies that we are back on track. There is still a Pandemic hurdle to cross since this nasty Delta Variant has made us all so aware of the biological risks around us at all times. We’ve cancelled the Spain Trip, but we are still flying for five hours (our first flight in eighteen months), so we will be wearing our specially-purchased N-95 masks for the occasion and we will be Uber cautious while we are in NYC.
While I would likely get push-back from my kids if they thought I was doing something dangerous with this trip, I think it would still be something I feel I must do. My Top Gun dialogue tells me that I must never leave my wingman and my children are my wingmen and wingwoman. By the way, Tom Cruise is another one of those controversial actors that some people like to dislike, but who I have always admired, despite his dancing with Scientology. He, like Redford and Costner, is a natural talent on the screen in my opinion. I will never be as cool or as confident as Redford, Costner or Cruise. My waist size will never come within a foot of any of theirs (only Cruise divulges his at 32 inches, but at only 5’7” versus, say, Costner at 6’1”, I feel Costner is allowed a few more inches in the waist….and Redford comes in right in between them). But what I can do is be a natural at being a father to all three of my children, and that is the natural I aspire to be.