Lt. Robert Gregory, 1944; Vin Scully, about 1950

I grew up and I live in Arroyo Grande, in southern San Luis Obispo County.

San Luis Obispo County is pretty much evenly divided between Giants and Dodgers fans. We’re just above the cliffs, sometimes pink and sometimes gold at sunset, and the yucca spikes of the Gaviota Pass, which is where I believe Southern California begins. We refer to ourselves up here in SLO County as “The Central Coast.” But my baseball is Southern Cal. I grew up aDodger fan.

The fact that that my late father-in-law, Gail Bruce, who was kind of a surrogate father–I loved that man—was once a 49ers end cuts me no slack. Neither does my abiding love for San Francisco. My wife and I just visited and she took a picture of the alley named for Dashiell Hammett and she found the marker where Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s detective partner, was murdered.

But I am passionate, too, about Raymond Chandler and his detective, Philip Marlowe.

Gail Bruce, San Francisco 49ers, 1948-1951

To Giants fans around here, I am a disgrace.

The division here reminds me of my Dad, who grew up in the Ozarks during the Great Depression. Missouri was bloodily divided during the Civil War. The  wound didn’t heal.

In 1935, at the Texas County, Missouri, Fourth of July, an old Confederate snapped during the “The Star-Spangled Banner” and went after an old Yankee, once a drummer boy, with his Barlow knife.

In their personal Gettysburg, the two upset tubs of potato salad and platters of fried chicken and honeyed ham and sweet potato pies before young, strong men pried them apart and held them until the sheriff came.

By then, the onetime Confederate was jubilantly holding the onetime drummer boy’s ear aloft.

When Dad told that story, it was 1935 again and he was seventeen again. He was a marvelous storyteller.

The Dodgers-Giants divide here is less violent but just as deep. As a little boy, I feared two men: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Giants cleanup hitter Willie McCovey.

I am a Dodgers fan because I love Vin Scully.

Sandy Koufax was my other Dodger hero, and his retirement, when I was fourteen, hurt. When I learned what pitching had done to his arm, that hurt even more.

My relationship with my father was shot through with hurt. He was brilliant–-the comptroller for San Luis Obispo’s Madonna Construction, he of the hot-pink Inn–-but Dad had demons, too. He was a hard drinker and that made him fearful.

But he had moments of intuitive kindness, and, as a Sixties teen, I was no angel. Once, in high school, Dad sensed that I was deeply depressed. I was. I’d just dropped acid. I sneaked home in the morning dark, but the drug’s aftereffects stuck to me like nightmare cobwebs.

He took the day off from work and scrambled some eggs. Then we sat down in front of the television and watched the 1970 World Series.

Brooks Robinson, as he’d done to the 1966 Dodgers, scrambled the Reds.

I got my feet on the ground again.

I was closest to Dad when we were close to a radio—sometimes, a Zenith Transoceanic, whose twin I’ve seen in photos next to Ernest Hemingway in Kenya. Dad had introduced me, at sixteen, to For Whom the Bell Tolls, and when Robert Jordan breaks his leg near the novel’s end, mine began to hurt as I was reading. John McCain loved that book, and me, and Dad.

Of course, Dad and I listened to the call of Koufax’s perfect game. In the ninth, we didn’t breathe much. When Koufax struck out the side, he hugged me.

Because Dad so hard and often worked late, I often listened to Dodger games by myself on a little transistor radio with a single earplug. Vinny was my radio father. He was that way to hundreds of thousands of little boys and girls he’d never meet.

Sometimes, especially during a home stand, when games ran into extra innings, I’d fall asleep with his voice in my ear, only to have the Farm Report wake me the next morning.

Dad died in a morning dark in 1985. Vinny died a year ago August 2. Death is both a coward and a liar, as Milton noted. I became a high school history teacher because my father and Vin Scully taught me how to teach.

The teenaged students I loved so much resembled the fans in the Coliseum, where I saw my first Dodgers game in 1958, against Stan Musial’s Cards (the Gashouse Gang was Dad’s team growing up). Even then, just seeing the game wasn’t enough for Dodger fans. Transistor radios and Vin’s stories made it real.

I became determined to make history real, too, from Botticelli to Wasily Kandinsky, from Elizabeth I to Lincoln, from Emily Wilding Davison to Rosa Parks.

Last week, I got a message from a former student who’d visited the Uffizi. She stood transfixed before Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

Now, she told me, she understood why I was so passionate about a painting that was completed in 1486.

My older son, John, was just three days old when Scully called Gibson’s home run in 1988. I felt completed. Now, after Dad, Gail and Vinny, I was a father, too.

John and me, October 1988

We are rejoicing 80-year-old Harrison Ford’s fifth and probably final Indiana Jones film, and we are right to do so. I have enjoyed the series, perhaps the interplay with Sean Connery in The Last Crusade the most—oh, and that zeppelin scene.

Both Indy and Han Solo are heroes. For Ford, that’s a problem, even though the mythologist Joseph Campbell aptly described Solo as a hero who didn’t know that he was a hero.

In an interview with Chris Wallace on CNN, Ford himself bristled at the interviewer’s use of the word “hero.” He was not a hero, he insisted, and he didn’t play heroes. He was instead an actor playing the roles of fallible men.

That’s what is so appealing, to me, about John Book in Witness, a film I’ve watched three times in the last month. (It’s a good Dickensian name, by the way: Ford’s detective is honest; he lives by the book, but, unlike the Amish, he’s not of the book.)

Book is a fallible man, but in his bedrock integrity—and in his vulnerability, a dangerous term to use because of its Wokiness—he reminds me of another Harrison Ford detective, Deckard, in the remarkable 1982 film Blade Runner.

In Witness, Ford’s character is allowed so many unheroic moments, including in the way he wolfs down a Philadelphia hot dog to pause, a little ashamed, when he realizes that the witness and his mother are praying over their meal. (It pains me a little, too, to see Detective Book drinking bleak squad-room coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, but that’s another subject altogether.)

Yes, the audience cheered when Book punched out the lout with the tight jeans and the razor-cut hair who was decorating Alexander Gudonov’s face with the ice-cream cone, but that was chum for the movie sharks. Me, too. I cheered with everybody else.

The moments that amazed me, though, came in Ford’s eyes, in his terror as the two detectives search for Book in the barn (The suffocation in corn scene was borrowed from Frank Norris’s muckraking novel The Octopus. The villain is suffocated in a ship’s hold being filled with San Joaquin Valley wheat.), or in the intensity of his look as he urges the little boy, Lukas, to run to the neighbor’s farm.

Lukas begins to run, but returns, rings his grandfather’s barnyard bell and so summons the neighbors, who run to the Haas farm. It’s there where John Book, backed by Amish in dense cornfield ranks, confronts his nemesis, Detective Capt. Schaeffer, and in a near-tearful fury, wears him down.

The love story is inevitable, and Kelly McGillis is radiant, but to me, the real heart of the story is John Book’s love for the little boy. One of the film’s small miracles is the perpetual motion machine Book builds for his friend, the witness—Ford was a carpenter once, too, and that’s where the scar on his chin came from—and another is the brief scene where Lukas introduces Book to what is miraculous to all little boys, a litter of kittens.

I love this film, too, because it was directed by Peter Weir, an Australian and one of my favorite directors, who gives us such a sensitive and powerful look into Amish life. I do not know how he did it.

Maybe it’s a romanticized look, and yes, I flinch at the seeming subservience of women, but the barn-raising scene is so evocative to me, especially today, because we Americans are so bitterly divided. The embrace, even if it’s temporary, of Book into the wider community in this scene reminds me of the better angels of our nature.

It took an outsider, an Aussie, to give us such an authentically American vision— one, again, that has such potential power in what it teaches us.

I cautioned against romanticizing the Amish, but it’s a bigger mistake to underestimate them and their faith. I made this video to introduce my high-school history students to these people. The word “remarkable” seems appropriate, I think.

And it’s a remarkable film, down to its end.

John Book stands on the porch and Rachel in her doorway at the film’s’s end, in a scene framed the way John Ford would’ve composed it as he did in My Darling Clementine and The Searchers. Like Wayne in the latter film, Book in his frame, on the porch, is straddling a no-man’s land. Rachel, in hers, stands in doorway shadows that are Rubenesque, as is the generosity of her body, as, most of all, is the brilliance of her beautiful eyes. McGillis’s Rachel would’ve made Rubens weep.

And what is Book to do?

He takes so long to make up his mind, and when he finally walks away to that beat-up little VW wagon, his body is heavy with grief. Even that wordless moment is a tribute to Ford’s acting.

Why did he leave in such pain? Well, there were Rachel and Lukas and Eli, the grandfather. and Book was a man without a family. He was was profoundly urban and secular and modern. But in his world, poisoned by crooked cops, he’d escaped for a short time to find that there is such a thing as moral certainty.

That is a dangerous concept, to be sure—one National Socialism held dear, for example. What makes Witness true to the heart is that the moral certainty Book encounters, ironbound as it is by 17th-Century dogma, is leavened by compassion and generosity. Gott ist die liebe.

Goodbye, English.

You don’t have to believe me. Look at Mama Cass’s reaction. Janis covers “Ball and Chain,” by Big Mama Thornton, the same woman who gifted Elvis with “Hound Dog,” and sails with it. I don’t know if human pain has ever been so exquisitely expressed.

Given Saudi Arabia’s execution of 81 people in a single day in March, I am not following the PGA tour lately.

So I missed the Scottish Open, and I will break my fast next week, I guess, for the British Open.

I paid for my beliefs. That darlin’ Ulster lad, Rory McIlroy, whom I love (his Ma looks like a real person and he has a beautiful little daughter) won the Scottish Open Sunday.

He was behind by one at the 17th and had won by one once he’d finished the 18th.

Back on the 7th hole, he’d hit a 427-yard drive. If you look at his finish, I haven’t been that flexible since I was eighteen months old and could insert my foot into my mouth (literally, not figuratively, which I still do frequently.)

Here are other comparisons to a 427-yard drive:

–Paul Bunyan getting tired in the desert one day and dragging his axe behind him. The trail it left we call today The Grand Canyon.

–In 1963, Warren Spahn’s Braves beat Juan Marichal’s Giants 1-0. Both men pitched 16 innings.

–Mom Angela Cavallo, in 1982, lifted a 1964 Chevy Impala to free her teenaged son, who was pinned underneath. He survived.

On the 17th hole, he hit a 5-iron cut–look at the difference in the finish–and look where it wound up. Birdie.

The young man looking bereft after that shot was leading at the time. He knew just what was about to happen. The same must have occurred to Custer that hot day in 1876.

On the 18th, McIlroy hit a two-iron, a club that’s faintly terrifying (the clubhead, at the end of the shaft, seems no bigger than a soup spoon) into the teeth of a howling Scots wind. It was a low screamer, the kind of shot Lee Trevino learned to master growing up in Texas winds.

Birdie.

My rough-tough father-in-law, the ex 49er, was once asked what the toughest sport was. Because of the combination of physical skill and emotional self-control, he took no more than two seconds.

“Golf.” he said.

I was born in 1952, so if you do the math, I was around at just about the right time to fall madly in love with girls (a little older than I) on shows like Shindig and Hullabaloo. We all did, boys my age. Some of the dances included the Watusi, the Jerk, the Swim, the Slauson, the Frug. I danced ineptly but admired those with ept.

Especially those girls on TV.

But it occurred to me today that they were marvelous dancers who were exploited. That doesn’t mean that I still can’t have fun watching them. But it does remind me of how much the world has changed and how ingrained in us was a certain dismissiveness of women.

I got a little sadder thinking about this, about me fifty-five years ago, but the girls in the 1970 clip in the included in this video looked sad to me, too. Something has changed by 1970. If it was painful, it was probably needed, too.