[BillyMac]

My daughter's fiancé is from Australia. He's been here in the United States for about a year, attending school to become an electrician while my daughter is attending medical school. Last weekend the three of us attended a cricket match, my first experience with cricket. As it turns out, news to me, Hartford, Connecticut, is a "hotbed" of cricket because of a large Western Caribbean population, whose parents, or grandparents, came here as immigrants to work the tobacco fields (shade tobacco used for cigar wrappers, best in the world, sans Cuba).

When a batsman hits the ball, on the ground, past the oval shaped perimeter boundary, marked on the field by a series of flags, it's a "four", and the batter's team is automatically awarded four runs, kind of like a ground rule double in baseball. Last weekend, the grass on the field was kind of high due to all the rain that we had. A batted ball barely reached the boundary area, stopping within inches of passing, or not passing, the flag. The fielder immediately signaled to the umpire that the ball actually had passed the boundary, thus awarding the batsman an automatic "four". I looked at my future son-in-law and he said, "Now that's cricket".