The recent Updike tributes, in the New Yorker and other magazines, were great reminders of his work outside of the Rabbits and the Witches--like an excerpt from one of my favorite sports pieces ever, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." Updike introduced me to a Fenway Park I never knew, but wish I did:
Understand that we were a crowd of rational people. We knew that a home run cannot be produced at will; the right pitch must be perfectly met and luck must ride with the ball. Three innings before, we had seen a brave effort fail. The air was soggy; the season was exhausted. Nevertheless, there will always lurk, around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.
And the Updike extravaganza reminds me that I still haven't attempted to recreate his "Rockefeller Center Ho" trip (from a February 1956 issue of the New Yorker), and see if it is, in fact, possible to get from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center without touching 5th or 6th Avenues. I should get on that.
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