Moonlight in Minnesota

Ghost Tours Should Come With Adult Refreshments

Convinced I should stroll the streets of St. Augustine with a band of tipsy Floridians and wide-eyed tourists, I found myself with a friend on a ghost tour of America’s oldest European settlement.  The stone walkways below us and the period costumes ahead of us made the nighttime walk seem only moderately more interesting than any other evening constitutional.  Nevertheless, like dozens of mid-size, moderately historic towns in the United States, “ghost tours” entice sightseers, both doubters and believers, to giggle or gasp at the stories tied to a community’s parks, plazas, and promenades.  Ghost tours in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, are most likely tales of military death and woe.  Ghost tours in New Orleans tell the tale of the haunted history of the Big Easy and the mademoiselle who still roams the French Quarter.  In each locale, unsuspecting, unresolved souls stumble into an ambling storyteller bewitching their followers with cryptic tales of foolish passers-by unknowingly relieved of their wits and wages.  Sounds like someone I know intimately.

I begin the evening adventure as dusk transitions into darkness and as my evening buzz fades along with the final remnants of sunlight.  I giggle, I roll my eyes, and I wonder how much longer until we reach a saloon where I might find a brew to keep me happily unconcerned that I am, in fact, bored out of my skull.  Nothing about the occult charms me.  While I do believe some people have a connection to the nether world, I believe mediums have powers I cannot understand and allow them to communicate with the dearly departed.  Yet I believe neither me, nor the costumed tour guide earning $10.82 an hour for her evening gig, facilitate a connection to the other side on this warm night in north Florida.  I believe this tour needs adult refreshment to make it remotely interesting.

Gravestones Should Come With Baseballs

Most people who visit Rochester, Minnesota, seek the medical recommendations of the renowned Mayo Clinic, but not me.  Sure, I may have planned to pop in on family members, but the cover story in the human-interest section of the local paper caught my pop culture eye and took me to a small, two-acre plot.  W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, led to Kevin Costner plowing under his corn fields on the big screen, and the tiniest bit of trivia from the American pastime impacted the novel, the movie, and the history of the Rochester area.  And it made my trip unique and remarkable.

 

Now buried in a plot next to his wife, Alecia, Archibald Graham spent nearly nine decades serving his family and town rather than continuing to play baseball beyond the single inning of professional stardom that he savored and discarded.  Kinsella found Graham's simple stat when writing his novel, and on a summer afternoon, I find his simple headstone after strolling through the graveyard referenced in the daily news.  In the light of day, without a tour guide, or a hint of intoxication, or an over-inflated story, I reach out to the other side to thank “Moonlight” Graham for his contribution to American film lore and my expedition to the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.  And laying next to his granite slab, a perfectly-placed leather sphere with its signature red stitching marks the appreciation of another fan like myself who had taken the same self-guided tour.

Field of Dreams

“Is This Heaven?”

As a baseball aficionado, films about America’s pastime rank among my favorites.  Even my baseball genre DVDs are separated from the rest of my films.  Along one wall of my living room is my meager baseball exhibit: my World Series ticket from 2008, an autographed ball from the Robinsons (Brooks and Frank), a miniature commemorative bat from the 1931 World Series Cardinals victory, and a photo of my boys running the bases at the Field of Dreams.  The corn may have only been just above knee high at the end of May, but the white farm house, the simple wooden bleachers, and the winding road through Iowa all held the same appearance as they did when Kevin Costner and Ray Liotta first put bat to ball and book to celluloid.

I have driven through Iowa more than once, and certainly never likened it much to heaven.  As we often joked, Iowa positioned itself as the land between Missouri and Minnesota with poor cellular service.  Often I think of Robert Preston stepping off the train and giving it a try, but for most of my childhood, I knew very little else about the Hawkeye State.  In fact, I always associated Hawkeye with Crabapple Cove, Maine.  So on a return trip through the heartland, we stopped outside the flat landscape of Dyersville to see the former cornfield turned movie set, turned roadside attraction that finds itself terribly far from the Hollywood Hills.  With no one else in sight, we certainly aren’t in Los Angeles anymore.

Reenactment

From the time they were young, I brought my sons to the ballpark.  The day I found out I was expecting Son #2, Son #1 and I watched the Marlins at Spring Training.  I recall a cold double-header that finished with more people on the field than in the stands.  Winning a contest off the radio, my son sat in the announcer’s box for an entire minor league game.  Spring Break at Wrigley, summer in Busch Stadium, and the fall classic all spread throughout various years, stadiums, and memories.  But the Field of Dreams evokes different recollections from having been played and replayed in our home.  And with just three of us and no one else for miles, we only recreate a handful of scenes on this unseasonably cool late May afternoon.

The boys walk into the corn fields, hoping to disappear into the stalks.  The boys reverse their course and walk out of the rows of ears, but with its height being a mere eighteen inches, they stand high above the budding tassels.  Lacking gloves or balls or Louisville sluggers, the boys run the bases, clutch the chain link back stop and perch on the sturdy, small stands as if watching the memories of ball players they had witnessed in the past games we enjoyed together, much like the movie’s characters marveled in the gamesmanship of the historic players mysteriously appearing on the field.  We stop here in Iowa for reasons we can't even fathom. We turn up the driveway not knowing for sure why we're doing it. We arrive at the field as innocent as children, longing for the past.  And in the most distant moments of everyday life I sometimes recall our brief time on the Field of Dreams and wish to myself, “I’d like to be there now.”