"And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they 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, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has 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, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."

I turned thirty this week, and it was not at all the traumatic experience I was fearing. Instead, I took a nice, leisurely day to myself on the actual day, and then had a whole week of scattered lunches, dinners, coffees, drinks, etc, with various friends. It was pretty great!