As I wrote in my Father’s Day post a couple of months ago, baseball has long been a deep connection that my father and I share. He was my coach all the way through high school, and I can’t even begin count the number of games we have attended together—from Spring Training through the last game of the World Series and everything in-between, including the College and Little League World Series. If it’s associated with baseball, my dad and I are tuned in. The baseball people out there know exactly how I feel. Dad and I decided in late May to finally take the father/son pilgrimage we had talked about forever to the real Field of Dreams located in Dyersville, Iowa, the actual site where the movie was filmed. We made the trip last week. Everything is still there—the house, the field, the bleachers and the corn, all of it. And 20 years later it looks just as it did on the big screen.
Just one week before Shani was killed, she was in South Florida with me to do some house-hunting. I had accepted my new job down there just a few weeks before and the transition from Atlanta to Miami had begun. The day before Memorial Day, she and I went to a local yoga studio to take a class, after which we struck up a conversation with the instructor. Standing in the lobby, she began telling us about a kind of trauma therapy that she was studying. Without any knowledge of Shani’s history or her mother’s murder, she simply started sharing this information with us. Shani was locked in, asking her questions, completely engaged in the dialogue. Not having experienced any major traumas in my life to that point, both of us thought that the reason for having met this woman was to provide insight into Shani’s continued healing from her mother’s murder 19 years before. No one could ever have known that I would be the one who would need this information more than anyone, and that this would be the same kind of treatment I would undergo months later in Los Angeles while suffering from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder associated with the effects of Shani’s murder.
She ran a quick exercise with us. In the lobby of the studio, she had us close our eyes. Not knowing either of our histories, and not asking us to share them, she spoke in vague terms.
“I want you to visit the most horrible experience of your life. Don’t fall completely into it, but take a quick glance. Stay there for just a second,” she said.
We followed her instructions.
“Ok. Now I want you to visit the most perfect time in your life; that one instant where everything in the world felt right.”
And after a brief pause she said, “Now open your eyes. Did you notice the shift? The physical response to where your mind took you? That’s what the therapy involves. It weaves you in and out, so that you’re not overwhelmed and stuck in the horror. Then it immediately connects you to perfect feelings of calm, awareness and joy. Weaving in and out eventually bridges the two and trains your mind to not get stuck in the pain of past events, so that when other things trigger those memories, you develop the coping skills of becoming grounded again.”
Shani knew my love for baseball, and through the years, she developed an appreciation for it, even if she was more than ready for the season to end by the time October rolled around. I remember on the ride home after the brief trauma experiment feeling compelled to share with her how my moment of perfect connection was that fraction of a second in baseball when the ball makes contact with the bat and you know that it’s going to be a home run even before you finish the backswing. In less than a second, everything is still. None of your problems matter. Nothing else exists but you, the extended bat, and the ball. The energy flows from your body, down through your hands, into the barrel of the bat. The angle at which the bat and the ball collide sends the ball sailing in a perfect trajectory, and without even having to look up, you know that it’s gone. Little did I know at the time that I was describing to Shani what would later become a consistent therapeutic mental exercise for me in healing from her murder just a week later and that this would be one of the last face-to-face conversations she and I would share together.
When Dad and I found out that we could actually hit on the Field of Dreams, I had one goal. I wanted to put one in the corn just like Shoeless Joe Jackson, Ray Liotta’s character in the movie. I wanted to hit a home run on the Field of Dreams.
Upon arriving, the scene was surreal. It didn’t feel as though we were on a movie set at all. Having seen the movie countless times, I felt right at home. With a few tourist onlookers standing behind the backstop, my dad toed the rubber on the pitcher’s mound, and I stepped into the batter’s box, something each of us had done hundreds of times during my childhood. He threw a few pitches, and I took some pretty ugly swings. It was obvious that both of us were more than a little rusty. But after a few minutes, both of us started to settle in, even though it had been at least 20 years since he had last thrown to me.
And then, that magical moment happened. Dad threw the “healing pitch.” It was thigh high and out over the plate. My hands reacted. Quick and to the ball and almost perfectly balanced, I turned on it. And when I did, I knew it had a chance to get out. Time stood still. I floated to the left, out of the batter’s box, my eyes fixed on the ball as I called out my own play-by-play.
“Did he get it?!?! Did he get it?!?!”
The ball kept sailing. It seemed to just hang in the air carrying further and further until it finally disappeared deep into the cornfield, the naturally landscaped outfield fence.
We both threw our hands in the air, the rush of excitement flowing like an electric current through my body.
“He got it!” I yelled.
Of all of the home runs I ever hit as a kid, from Little League all the way through college, I have never been so connected to the physical response my body experienced in those moments. I was present and absorbed in the experience. There was no tension, no angst, no grief and no pain. There was only joy.
It was perfect.
For the majority of the past 15 months, I have felt like I was facing the greatest pitcher known to man. Life had been throwing me unhittable curveballs and blowing me away with 100 mph fastballs. The only way I ever reached base seemed to be when I got hit in the side of the head with the ball. But for once, in refusing to give up, not allowing myself to die and continuing to swing away, I finally connected with life, quite literally, in a visceral experience.
They built it, and my dad and I came. We went the distance and my pain was eased at the Field of Dreams.
No comments:
Post a Comment