It really wasn't much about baseball

Last night, for our family time movie, we enjoyed Trouble with the Curve starring Clint Eastwood. I highly recommend it. Yes, there's a fair amount of cheese. But, like Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood continues to give his viewers his best in his twilight years.

Clint Eastwood reminds me a lot of Johnny Cash. Though it pains me Eastwood is not a Christian as Cash was. These two exemplify that raw masculinity, especially in their old age, that is quite enduring to me. Not perfect men, their mistakes in life certainly add to every wrinkle of wisdom shown on their faces. Just as I knew "Hurt" would be one of Johnny's best and last great works, I get the sense I'll have to savor these last couple movies from 82-year-old Eastwood.

The movie is about a father and his daughter. The movie is about a father who, all his life, tried to make the right decisions. The movie is about forgiveness. The movie is about youthful arrogance that disparagingly ignores the wisdom of its elders. And there's a bit about baseball in it as well.

That the movie contained baseball and a father and daughter was even more moving. RLB and our oldest daughter have a love in common in baseball. I enjoy watching the game, but I have no where near the interest that our daughter has shown. She'll eagerly listen to RLB talk of the players and their stats, teams and their strengths and weaknesses. As we approach spring training, they are both chomping at the bit to get their fantasy teams going.

It's interesting how children will gravitate to one parent or the other. I find it has a lot to do with personality types. Our youngest shares a lot of her father's personality and is my girl. She is the funny one, much like her dad though she is not introverted as he is. From a very young age she has had a sharp wit and perfect timing of the delivery. She'll shop with me, cook with me, clean with me without complaint.

Our oldest daughter, however, shares most of my personality traits, though she's not extroverted as I am. It makes it easy for Dad to be her love. As a father, this is a delicate relationship to have. She is not a boy and though it may be tempting to treat her like one, she is still a product of the hormones and emotions that can consume her. This father/daughter dynamic, if taken for granted, can lead to the oft challenging "daddy issues" in a young woman. A theme you'll see right from the beginning of the movie.

There is also plenty of aspects of Game throughout the movie that kept my son laughing. He's a student of Game currently so it remains his focus in all his observations. We had to tell him to hush during the movie because he was so eager to explain just what one guy did wrong and the other did right. RLB loves talking to him about these things after an uninterrupted movie.

It was a great movie that I actually stayed awake through. My family teases me that I suffer a bit of narcolepsy when it comes to watching movies. I've only seen the first fifteen minutes of most of what they watch. So if at the end of a movie I'm talking to them, everyone exclaims how it must have been a good one.