The real Opening Day is tomorrow at Fenway

Barring an act of divine intervention, I don't expect to physically be there (metaphysically is something else), my first miss in three years, but it will be good for the Sox to get back to Fenway, 96 years old and still a beauty. Word is that some Sox enthusiasts will gather at Nick-a-Nee's for the proceedings.

Take it away, John Updike, from his classic Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu:

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff.