Mom and I munched on Chicago-style deep-dish pepperoni pizza (which my miracle children had delivered from a Costoco freezer) while the two of us watched Field of Dreams, because I started a new book about baseball ballparks as fundamental features in the community fabric of American cities over nearly two centuries, and I wept at the transcendently beautiful James Horner soundtrack (not available on Spotify!) that carries me up and out fretfulness, and I bawled and bawled at Ray asking to play catch with his distant departed dad, but hiding my face from Mom for wanting to sob privately and unseen and for not wanting her to see me as her little baby boy anymore, wondering about the things we say or don’t say to our dads over the long decades and the things our dads say or don’t say to us, to me, and how some things wanting to be said cannot be said because the other’s ears have never learned to hear what I need to say and so I don’t speak or we speak in cryptic codes and we slap each other’s shoulders discuss safe subjects and we end up not saying anything at all, but wondering if we should have, and wishing we could have, in time, but understanding that no one, I think, ever says everything they wanted to say before the hearer is dead and cannot hear ever again until some goofball mystic plows under his corn and builds a ballpark in Iowa, and I’m asking him if he wants to play catch, so we play catch, tossing the ball back and forth with silly smiles, finding that, in this heaven, we don’t need to say anything at all.
Rabbit Lane 