Luckily, it didn’t take much (it was really only an hour, after all, and I didn’t even get any bruises) but it was abundantly, extravagantly erased by:

lots of sympathy from family and friends, both in the computer and out

+ a quiet afternoon playing with my boys

+ Saturday morning at the farmer’s market listening to a friend’s band

+ an afternoon at our friends’ new home, making up for the previous day’s aborted playdate

+ an impromptu barbecue with three other families (8 kids under 6 all playing easily together while the parents eat and visit)

+ Sunday morning’s chocolate-chip coconut coffee cake (happy Father’s Day, Tony!)

+ a sunny afternoon at the San Jose Giants game, both watching the game and, when it got too hot, watching the boys play the carnival games in the parking lot

+ another great dinner with friends (two nights in a row being fed by someone else!)

+ another late night, carrying sleepy, sweaty-headed boys from the car up to bed

= a sunny summer weekend with old friends and happy kids and good food

I wanted to write about a father this month — Father’s Day month — for my movie column, and with all the baseball going on in our house lately, I thought a baseball movie would be appropriate, too. Besides, everything I know about baseball I learned from my dad.

But baseball + fatherhood + Hollywood = sappy, sentimental, movies. I could not get past the first twenty minutes of the first several baseball movies I tried. Then I watched Bull Durham (for the fifth or sixth time) to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Then I tried to write about Susan Sarandon’s Annie, who — when she’s not tutoring young ball players is tutoring writers — but the motherhood angle there is an impossible stretch and Kevin Costner’s Crash as a father figure really doesn’t work either.

But Annie the writing teacher and Kevin Costner triggered a memory for me, and I checked out Field of Dreams. Yes, this is another sentimental baseball movie but it does have a writer in it, played by James Earl Jones, and he proves instrumental in helping Kevin Costner’s baseball-loving character reconcile with the idea of being a dad. So this, ultimately, is what I came up with; check it out and let me know what you think!