Since I was too busy Sunday to come up with a new column, I thought I’d run one from Father’s Day 2004:
My son gave me an early present last weekend. He asked me to hit him some fly balls.
That may not sound like your idea of the perfect Father’s Day gift, but he couldn’t have asked for anything dearer to my heart. This is an activity – ritual really – that we’ve been re-enacting since he was 9.
It takes place at Rehm Park in the open meadow, ringed by the pool on the north, tennis courts on the east, a row of deciduous trees to the south and the playground to the west. Rehm on a lovely summer afternoon is a busy place – but not in the meadow, which is usually an oasis of tranquility.
It’s just long enough to loft fly balls from an aluminum bat to the leather-encased hand of a growing child.
For most baseball fans, the iconic father-son bonding activity is playing catch – as depicted in the final scene from the film Field of Dreams – a nice image, but playing catch gets old pretty fast.
Over the years, my son and I have sustained our bond with fly balls. I enjoy smacking a baseball (a useful sublimation) and watching it soar high and long; he enjoys running them down and smothering them with his oversized Chipper Jones-model mitt. I hit well over 100 fly balls each time we go. I usually have to put up the white flag, in fact, to get him to leave.
Rehm is the perfect place for all this. It’s a pretty park, and the playground and pool are abuzz with activity. Throw in a “blue true dream of sky” (as e.e. cummings put it) dotted with billowing cumulus, and several lives flash before my eyes.
There is the life with my son as he has grown older and more graceful. He glides under the ball now where once he pounded and lunged. There is my own childhood in this very park, this neighborhood, this village, which still exists, yet is no more. As the ball follows gravity’s rainbow (as Thomas Pynchon put it), these memories acquire a pleasing particularity. Even the sunshine regains its innocence, resurrecting images of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays in their prime. Ice cream truck bells jangle down my once-upon-a-time street – just a few blocks from here – while Jack Brickhouse calls a game from Wrigley Field.
Memories of life with my father also join the parade: His 30-year youth baseball coaching career started in this park (known as South Park then) when I was just 7 years old and scared to death of that hard, stitched ball.
Finally, there is life as it leisurely unfolds this day, with kids leaping off diving platforms, a group of teens playing “footbag” on the tennis courts, neighbors trading stories from their folding chairs while sponging some sun. A capless kid in a baseball uniform stands on the paved path, silently watching our exchange. When a couple of eligible young women stroll by, my outfielder’s energy level noticeably increases, hoping perhaps to make an impression.
But the real pleasure here is in the rhythm. Ball after ball takes a nearly identical path to his glove, then bounces lazily back to my hand from his restrained relay. One author calls this “Flow,” or the state of “optimal experience” – relaxing repetition requiring just enough skill to be satisfying. Our childhoods converge in this pleasing present – time, momentarily tamed.
A grandmother passes, toddlers in tow, and asks, “Is he on a team?”
“He used to be,” I say. “Now we just do it for fun.”
May it never end.