"Field of Dreams"

It went something like this, I guess. The filmmakers started with sixty pictures of Iowa farms thought to be possibilities for making this movie. What they wanted, of course, was endless cornfields where there was the fairly substantial promise that the crop would come up tall and healthy, and where, out west of the place ("if you build it, they will come") gorgeous sunsets would delight the evening sky. 

So, the story goes that the woman appointed to do the choosing, a woman named Sue Reidel, got to a photograph of the Lansing farmstead, down a lonely gravel road, and, just like that, went for it--"perfect." The truth is that they trucked in water early that summer, pulled it all the way from Lake Michigan, because they needed to be sure that the corn that season would reach optimum height. Otherwise, once the decision was made, the Lansing place started to take shape as a baseball diamond.

The man who wrote the book Shoeless Joe that became the movie is a Canadian writer named W. P. Kinsella, who went on to have a successful career as a novelist and died ten years ago already. The story, the novel, and the film all employ what people call magical realism--no, gangs of dead baseball players didn't come walking out of the corn like they do so gracefully in the movie. That's magic realism.

Thursday night, the Minnesota Twins will face off against the Philadelphia Phillies, real, live professional teams, not spirits or ghosts or fantasies. Tickets are long gone, but Netflix will put the game up for those of us who can't make it all the way across the state. 

That t-shirt at the top of the page is mine, purchased for me by an old friend who told me some time in the 90s that he was taking his family out east and stopping at Dyersville just to see "the field of dreams." He was just eccentric enough to do that, so I told him, jokingly, to pick me up a t-shirt. He did. 

Sometime later, this old friend was killed on a Sioux Center street when struck by a truck. That death--and something of his life--is somewhere in it, a stain in the old t-shirt only my eyes can see. It can't be removed. It's not just another t-shirt. It's been with me for decades.

Anyway, I'll be watching Thursday night.