No One Asked Me But… (February 14, 2024)

By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… Earlier this year I turned my column over to my oldest son when I ran across an essay he had written about baseball. Baseball has always been a binding factor in our family.
Today I am turning to my middle son’s writing on our summer trips to Iowa.

I was born and raised in Iowa. I left Iowa when I joined the Marine Corps in 1960. I came to Las Vegas as a teacher in the Clark County School District in 1967, and my wife and I established a summer tradition of returning to Iowa for the summer layoff. We had access to a house in the small town of Maxwell, Iowa and each year we would retreat there for the summer.

I have few close family members left in Iowa, but as strange as it may seem when I think of home I am usually thinking of Iowa.

My middle son’s essay entitled Iowa Dreaming may explain this feeling so I thought I would share it with you, my readers.

It could be the middle of July in Iowa, and the mornings sometimes would send a chill that still whispered of either the passing of or the upcoming winter.
On days like these I could peek out the second story window of my great-grandpa’s house and see dew so thick that it seemed as if the first snow was laying on the ground. The rainbows sparkling off the crystalline dew made me wonder if maybe somehow, I had slumbered through the summer.
The eight-foot stalks of dark green corn shattered my icy dreams, though, and if I looked closely enough, I could see the thing that makes Iowa – Iowa. I didn’t realize it then, but the black soil -that black soil, nearly tarry soil, soil so thick that having an iron shoe scraper next to the back door was normal, soil so fertile that anything will sprout- that soil gave birth to just about everything that is important to me.

This meager dirt that could send corn reaching higher to the heavens than any other place on earth was the soil that produced the grains that fed the hogs that my older brother and I would help inoculate. We were city boys, but the dirt was in our streams. It was this dirt that cushioned the fall of my younger brother who gracefully tumbled down the basement steps onto the hardpacked floor. It was an amazing material. It effectively held up bottle rockets on the 4th of July and when it was wet it liked to pull the shoes right off your feet as if beckoning you to plant yourself. Maybe if I would have slowed down a little and actually allowed myself to be stuck for a moment I would be as tall as the corn.

Every year, it would seem, Iowa would be the summer destination of the family. The trip to Iowa was fairly uneventful and everyone usually got to come along. The poodle, whatever cat we had at the time. Sometimes a bird, and I vaguely remember a guinea pig traveling too. We would stop at sometimes beautiful, sometimes strange places along the way. Often, it was a circuitous route: Pioneer Village, Little America, Carlsbad Caverns, Yellowstone, even the House in the Rock.

Then lazy days of Iowa. Picking blackberries by the railroad tracks, searching for arrowheads in the stream bed, sneaking into the high school gym and swinging on the ropes. Idyllic and lost to our generations of the past. Everything would slowly change- almost.

Years would pass, and my oldest brother would no longer travel with us. The trips became more infrequent; the summers better spent playing baseball at home or whatever life would throw at us. Soon, my time in Iowa also passed and my younger brother traveled alone, and Iowa became nothing more than a fleeting memory of youthful days passed.

The constant however was the soil. It was the same soil that popularized the movie Field of Dreams which showed the magic that could happen with the proper care and maintenance of the land under foot. That field is more than just movie magic, though. It exists, and it has become a popular tourist spot. Build it and they will come, indeed.

My father had returned to his homeland one summer without his sons. Traveling by car as we always did in the past, and he had the opportunity to run by the actual Field of Dreams. It must have been odd for him to pull up alongside the tourists buses filled with tourist from Japan, yet, they were there. A busload of families walking on the field.

My father was never one to waste an opportunity for the love of the sport, so back to the car he went and somewhere in the depths was an old bag of baseballs and some dusty mitts that had once been worn by his sons. Bats that had the history of hits and strike outs etched on them were also unloaded, and as he walked to the field he gained a following of kids. The magic of the land was again at hand.

Pitch after pitch until the buses had to be loaded up for their next destination, young Japanese boys and girls took swings on perhaps the most famous international baseball field. The soil didn’t care who it supported, and all grew a little more that day as they basked in the Iowa sun and felt the warmth of the earth pushing into their feet.

Until at last, my father stood alone rooted to the mound with nothing more to do but to walk out to the cornfield and disappear (for a while) in the eight-foot stalks of corn.

Thought of the week…John Kinsella: “Is this heaven?” Ray Kinsella: “It’s Iowa.” John Kinsella: “Iowa? I could have sworn this was heaven.”
– Field of Dreams