I'm a Stranger Here Myself Read Online Free PDF Page A

but that was the drift of my sentiment.
    But the requirement, you see, is not simply to identify yourself but to identify yourself in a way that precisely matches a written instruction.
    Anyway, I changed tack and begged. I promised never again to turn up at an airport without adequate ID. I took on an attitude of complete contrition. I don’t suppose anyone has ever shown such earnest, remorseful desire to be allowed to proceed to Buffalo.
    Eventually, with reluctance, the supervisor nodded at the clerk and told him to check me in, but he warned me not to try anything as slippery as this again and then departed with his colleagues.
    The check-in clerk issued me a boarding pass and I started toward the gate, then turned back, and in a low, confidential tone shared with him a helpful afterthought.
    “There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube,” I said. “Think about it.”

People sometimes ask me, “What is the difference between baseball and cricket?”
    The answer is simple. Both are games of great skill involving balls and bats but with this crucial difference: Baseball is exciting, and when you go home at the end of the day you know who won.
    I’m joking, of course. Cricket is a wonderful sport, full of deliciously scattered micromoments of real action. If a doctor ever instructs me to take a complete rest and not get overexcited, I shall become a fan at once. In the meantime, my heart belongs to baseball.
    It’s what I grew up with, what I played as a boy, and that of course is vital to any meangingful appreciation of a sport. I had this brought home to me many years ago in England when I went out on a soccer ground with a couple of English friends to knock a ball around.
    I had watched soccer on television and thought I had a fair idea of what was required, so when one of them lofted a ball in my direction, I decided to flick it casually into the net with my head, the way I had seen Kevin Keegan do it on TV. I thought that it would be like heading a beachball—that there would be a gentle, airy
ponk
sound and that the ball would lightly leave my brow and drift in a pleasing arc into the net. But of course it was like heading a bowling ball. I have never felt anything so startlingly not like I expected it to feel. I walked around for four hours on wobbly legs with a big red circle and the word “MITRE” imprinted on my forehead and vowed never again to do anything so foolish and painful.
    I bring this up here because the World Series has just started, and I want you to know why I am very excited about it. The World Series, I should perhaps explain, is the annual baseball contest between the champion of the American League and the champion of the National League.
    Actually, that’s not quite true because they changed the system some years ago. The trouble with the old way of doing things was that it involved only two teams. Now, you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to work out that if you could somehow contrive to include more teams there would be a lot more money in the thing.
    So each league divided itself into three divisions of four or five teams each. So now the World Series is not a contest between the two best teams in baseball—at least not necessarily—but rather between the winners of a series of playoff games involving the Western, Eastern, and Central divisional champions of each league, plus (and this was particuarly inspired, I think) a pair of “wild card” teams that didn’t win anything at all.
    It is all immensely complicated, but essentially it means that practically every team in baseball except the Chicago Cubs gets a chance to go to the World Series.
    The Chicago Cubs don’t get to go because they never manage to qualify even under a system as magnificently accommodating as this. Often they
almost
qualify, and sometimes they are in such a commanding position that you cannot believe they won’t qualify, but always in the end they doggedly manage to come up short. Whatever