Shoeless Joe in a Field of Dreams
“Hey, Dad. You wanna have a catch?”
“I don’t have to tell you that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has been erased like a blackboard, only to be rebuilt and then erased again. But baseball has marked time while America has rolled by like a procession of steamrollers. It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what once was, like an Indian-Head Penny in a handful of new coins”.
Excerpt from “Shoeless Joe” by W P Kinsella (1982)
I’ve read a lot of Stephen King books during this record breaking English heat wave summer of 2025 and departing albeit briefly from the master of horror, I couldn’t resist plucking Shoeless Joe from my bookshelves as I continue to hide from a world I don’t understand and beneath a benevolent sun that has, according to my Brother Andy (who isn’t, strangely, my brother) turned your humble narrator into the “blackest white man I’ve ever seen”.
We each have only a limited amount of spins around the sun and some more than others, so it was an easy decision to re-read Shoeless Joe beneath our current cloudless skies and a book (and then a 1989 film starring Kevin Costner entitled Field of Dreams) about America and the sport of baseball that is anything but. Both the book and the film (the book is beautiful but bucking the perceived wisdom of the book always being better than the film, the film is vastly, vastly better) isn’t really about America or indeed its national pastime. These two facets of both the book and the film are present and correct and a constant narrative through line, but Shoeless Joe/Field of Dreams is about far more than the sporting fabric of a country and a sport I’ve been obsessed with, even as a limey English gentleman, for well over three decades.
The beauty of both the book and the film is that each are rooted in tangible human traits and qualities that we all hold so dear to our beating human hearts, be it friends and friendships, family, life partners, watching our children grow up, the kindness of strangers or a port to call home when the storm is raging out of control all around us. Then we have the mortality of life itself, death and the accompanying all enveloping feeling of unimaginable grief, loss, regrets and the host of dreams left frustratingly unfulfilled. Where the book is superior to the film (though the film does a fine job of painting a continually surreal picture) is with the gaps (some might say chasms) left behind when a friend or family member departs for the great ballpark in the sky. So we have ghost stories aplenty to add to one man’s yearning for just one more day with his father, the voices in his head urging him to turn his cornfields into a baseball diamond to “ease his pain”, to “go the distance” and, as you might have seen or heard over the years whether in print form or at the cinema “If you build it, he will come”.
But not “Hey Dad. You wanna have a catch?”. That’s only reserved for the film, and a film about baseball that isn’t about baseball and a film that isn’t about baseball that I can’t watch anymore as it’s all about my Dad. There’s a scene about 15 minutes into the film that shatters me and by the time of the Hollywood ending and a father and son and a desperate man fulfilling his dreams by playing catch with the ghost of his young father and throwing a baseball to each other under the floodlights of his own field of dreams I’m gone, lost in a reverie for my own ghost and someone I’ve wanted one more conversation with, one more hug, one more smile and perhaps one more goodbye, for far, far too long.
All of this and much, much more is contained within the article below I originally penned and published in 2021 and which forms the centrepiece of one of the many books I’ve self-published since 2023.
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon