"Dad...You Wanna Have a Catch?"

I don’t even have to watch the whole movie. I can aimlessly scroll through the channels and if I happen to hit Ray Kinsella asking John—Dad—if he wants to have a catch, then a saline solution quietly seeps from the corners of my eyes. That scene kills me.

Here’s why: I had the best father a young man could ever imagine having. The older we got, the stronger our relationship became; he was my best friend, someone I talked to every day, about everything. But, when I was a boy, we both missed out on a lot of those moments Ray and John shared at the end of “Field of Dreams.” My father was never absent, like John in the fictional film; he provided for his family, and satisfied my every want and need save for one. Games of catch were few and far between, and I am sure this fact was as hard (perhaps much harder) for him as it was for me. My father, then an All-American athlete on a football scholarship at Carolina, contracted polio when he was 18 years old. Despite a death sentence from his doctors, he won the war against polio, but his body forever bore the battle scars. My dad was a month shy of his 40th birthday when I was born, and by the time I was serious about baseball he was walking with a cane. Two metal braces, strapped to his thin thighs, snapped in to his specially-made shoes to steady him. His right shoulder, frayed from years of helping do the work his atrophied leg muscles refused to do, ached from the Nerf football tosses my mother shunned in the house. And we weren’t more than ten feet apart.

So it was a rare treat, for me at least, when, balky shoulder and broken body be damned, he gave into my constant requests for a game of catch. The routine was always the same. I snatched my well-worn Rawlings mitt and my best baseball, no matter that we would be playing catch in the driveway and it may get scuffed—this was a special occasion. Richie Zisk was not exactly a household name, but he was in my house, as his cursive signature was branded into the palm of my glove. I dragged the aluminum folding lawn chair from the carport, where my dad’s blue whale of an Oldsmobile 98 was taking a break from guzzling gas, its rear bumper jutting out into the driveway. I unfolded the chair and set it in place, buttressed against the pole of the adjustable basketball goal my dad would always promptly replace when my friends and I got big enough to dunk it.

He soon ambled out, feeling his way to the chair with his cane. Dad’s plaid, short-sleeve cotton shirt clashed with the orange and green woven nylon as he unlatched his braces, allowing the knees to bend, and collapsed into the chair, a little winded from a diaphragm weakened from polio and a paunch that extended a little further over his beltline each year. He was in his late forties, but when he sat his pants climbed to the heights of a much older man, revealing the blue wool dress socks he wore to work every day. The metal of his braces caught the sun and shone like the chrome from the Olds.

I don’t even remember if he wore a glove, but, owing to his leather-helmet era toughness, I seem to remember him shunning the protection of a mitt, snatching my pre-adolescent fastballs with his bare hands. Fortunately for him, I never had much of an arm, but thanks to my immovable target and the pressure of not wanting to screw this rare game up by short-hopping him in the shins, I developed pretty good command. Tired-armed coaches from little league through high school would later call upon me to throw batting practice, which was both a blessing and a curse. I was valued for my ability to consistently throw strikes, giving my teammates ample opportunity to take their hacks, but my rubber right wing would never be seen as anything more than a batting practice arm. Oh how I longed to pitch in a game.

Most of my childhood pitching dreams—protecting a one-run lead in game seven of the world series, bases loaded, two outs, a 3-2 count on the batter in the bottom of the ninth—were played out alone in the driveway, a tennis ball in my hand instead of cowhide. I gave a running play-by-play to my audience of bushes: “With two strikes on the batter, Schmidt inches back a step at third. Sandberg has a foot in the outfield grass at second. Sanders is set; he delivers…” It would’ve been nice to get strike three just once, but the brick wall of our house that served as my backstop predictably bounced a one-hopper back to me, and I tried not to bobble it before recording the last out and getting mobbed by imaginary teammates. Looking back, even if those dreams had come to fruition, they could never measure up to the satisfying smack of leather into the leather of my father’s strong hands. He would give me an enthusiastic “strrrrrrikkke threeee!” before a flick of the wrist lobbed the ball back to me. I never wanted to let him go. Damn the darkness. Damn the dinner bell.

* * *

So now, with no cornfield to plow, I wait, not for the prompt of voices, but for the next generation of father-son catches. The overzealous purchase of a mitt, bought for the occasion of Silas’s first birthday, has languished for years, gradually settling to the bottom of a bin along with the detritus of plastic baby toys. I reserve hope that one day the boy will take an interest in it, and he’ll ask me if I’d like to have a catch. I may have to explain to him that sometimes people cry because they are so happy.