Taking A Swing At Life

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.

Godzilla

I’m currently in Chicago for the weekend, and I’m staying with my cousin, David, his wife, Sarah, and their son 17-month-old son, Tyler, at their home in Aurora, which is about 45 minutes from downtown. It was almost a year ago to the week that I was here on my first trip outside of Atlanta after Shani’s death. I stayed with them for a few days, doing everything I could to just get away and possibly enjoy myself, attempting to escape the horror movie that my life had become only 2 months before. While here, it just so happened that the New York Yankees were in town, so David and I drove into the city to catch one of the four games that weekend.