If You Build It, He Will Come

As you may know from this blog or from just knowing me, you'll know over the course of the past six or seven months I've been on quite an emotional journey (not to be confused with Larry Mullen Jr.'s "musical journey"). You'll also know that while the first several months were a collage of things that happened one after another and you'll know that the last four-six weeks (who is counting) has been a lot of hard core work.

Like any well trained Corporate Soldier, I actually had a plan and set of goals to effect the change in my life that I know I need to do to get my compass pointing north again. Though I started sometime in mid-July, it wasn't until early August that I have myself a month to not resolve everything thing but to put the wheels of change into motion. Two of those goals were dealt with in the past few weeks and some pleasant unplanned events occured as well. While my knee jerk reaction is that some of these unplanned events were long overdue, the reality is things happen when they are supposed to happen and not a minute (or year) earlier.

A lot of mystical odd things have happened recently, not least of all the thing on the bridge with the song. That said, I know what my goal is this week, it's next on the list (do I sound a bit like My Name Is Earl?). But I've had no idea where to start, how to start or even to frame how to begin resolving it. This morning I watched Kevin Costner on "Sunday Morning Shootout" (one of my favorite shows - the business of movies) and so it was with him on my mind that I even noticed this article on CNN.com (which I so rarely even look at anymore) about Dyersville, Iowa and Kevin Costner's best movie, Field Of Dreams.

My first thought when I saw the article is, "ooh, Field of Dreams is a great one for mining movie quotes!" But it only took a few seconds for it to sink in that on some level I was led to look at that article. It made me think of my current problem/goal in a different way and also gave me a bit of fortitude to actually tackle it. I have a new approach and new understanding for how important my next goal is. A cynic can say it was a coincidence but a news story about a movie that is nearly 20 years old and details a spit sized Iowa town that I've been to appearing on the front page of CNN.com? And I just happened to watch - out of allllll thing things on my TiVo - the Kevin Costner interview that would open my mind up a little bit to be interested in reading that.

OK, so it's hardly a mission to go find Terrance Mann and take him to a Red Sox game but to me, it was odd.

So my quote from Field of Dreams isn't one of the obvious ones you might think of - if you're an American male. Things like "You're guests in my corn!" and "What's a crop?" or "It was you, Ray" or "Dad, wanna play catch?" (show that scene at any Nascar event and suddenly the crowd
will look like 10,000 women watching Steel Magnolias) or any of those monosyllabic moments that made grown men cry in the theaters. No, I'm far too much a gurl to leave it to that.

It's from one of my favorite scenes in the movie - filmed in Galena, Illinois between Ray Kinsella and Archibald "Moonlight" Graham. Moonlight Graham says,

You know we just don't recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they're happening. Back then I thought, well, there'll be other days. I didn't realize that that was the only day.

I wish I could say how much that movie means to me and it's odd how I can relate to it in a way I know a lot of women don't. Probably because I grew up with only a father who probably treated me more like a son than a daughter. That movie shaped much of me and my sister's vernacular (in ways I can't even recount), it's a living memory since it was primarily filmed in Dubuque, Galena and Iowa - where not only I spent many summer vacations but also is the home state of my grandfather, and of course it was about baseball! But it was also about people who love each other but don't know how to talk.