Poem for Tuesday and State Fair Star Wars

People Will Come (from Field of Dreams) 

By Phil Alden Robinson 

People will come, Ray.

They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.

And they'll walk out to the bleachers, and sit in shirt-sleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game, and it'll be as if they'd dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces.

People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game -- it's a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.

Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.

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It was cool and lovely most of Tuesday until an hour or so ago when the rain arrived. I did a bunch of chores in the morning and went out to figure out how the new Pokemon Dynamax power spots work, so now I have some giant red Wooloos and Skwovets and I'm still not sure how they work in the game overall. We spent a lot of the afternoon making plans to travel for my mother-in-law's funeral around a walk to the beach. 

My Voyager group watched "Flesh and Blood" -- which none of us remembered was a two-parter until we were already partway through, so we kept on watching right into the debate hour. Afterward, we ate dinner, saw the end of the Orioles win, and in honor of James Earl Jones, we watched Field of Dreams, one of my two favorite roles of his. In tribute to the other, from the Popnology exhibit at the Washington State Fair: