WORLD SERIOUSLY

Tonight begins the end of the baseball season and I will be sorry to see it go. Only seven games remain, unless you believe, as my friend Paul does, that the Phillies will beat the Yankees in six games, in which case only six games remain, leaving us with no real team sport (Football, like boxing and wrestling, is not a sport in my view) to engage in until March, when baseball resumes.

Go Phils.

TRAVELS WITH CHARLIE

With apologies to John Steinbeck, these travels are with Charlie Manuel, the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, not a raggedy dog travelling across the country, although I would like to do that some day. And more, this note is about baseball itself...

Despite the concerted effort of the rich guys who own the teams to ruin baseball, it endures and it sustains itself by memories and nostalgia. You have to be raised in the United States and, maybe, Japan, to appreciate baseball. France won't do it. Belgium, maybe. But they'll have to pronounce BAULLL more clearly.

I once tried to introduce baseball to my girlfriend, Beatrice, an exchange student from France, in the summer of 1960. The Phillies were futile and the old ballpark, Connie Mack Stadium, once known as Shibe Park, was a wreck, but it would continue to host major league baseball for another 10 years. Typically the Phillies would fill about 10,000 of the 55,000 seats available and many less for a day game. I took Beatrice to a day game; a Sunday afternoon match against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

I parked on 21st St. and paid the kid who propositioned me $1.00 to "watch my car, mister," a way to insure having wheels and not milk crates propping up the vehicle after the game. I drove a 1953 Chevy then, purchased with the lucre of my summer job the previous summer on the boardwalk in Ocean City NJ, all $500 of it. It was worth a buck ransom.

We sat along the third base line, I remember, and we played the Dodgers, who had moved to L.A. only two years before, but who were still the team of black America because they had brought Jackie Robinson to the Bigs. Most of North Philadelphia was seated along the third base line too. Everyone had a brown paper bag. And Beatrice and I were treated to every form of booze for the first two innings – Night Train, Baltimore Club, Strawberry Blonde, Jack - we sipped them all. It wasn't long, though, before our newfound friends vacated the seats around us and it wasn't much longer until I realized that I was the reason they had left.

By explaining baseball in front of a crowd who knew everything about baseball, I had alienated my entire section. Telling the infield fly rule might have been acceptable, but who wants to listen to a callow white kid explaining the foul lines? I might have gotten away with strikes and balls, but double plays made them leave in droves and find new seats.

Charlie Manuel would understand this. They left the seats in droves when he came to town too. Beatrice, who has returned to Strasbourg, might not.

RIVER RUN

This has nothing to do with Philly. That's the point.

The Zambezi River runs along the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Where it crashes over the Victoria Falls, both countries have erected a bridge from which to view the cascade and, incidentally, to cross borders. Below the Falls, the river foam dissipates, the crocodiles sleep on little sand bars and the flow deepens into a meandering river that could be anywhere – Mississippi, Brazil, Paris.

Suddenly, though, a herd of elephants appears on the Zimbabwe side and I know we are not just anywhere. There must be seventy of them. Our guide, who has been managing the outboard motor in our aluminum boat, suddenly shuts it off and whispers at us to be quiet. "I think they may want to swim across," he says, "Don't spook them."

So we sit silently in the hot African breeze as mokurues, dug-out canoes, glide by paddled by native people. They wave at us, careful to be quiet too.

A massive elephant, the herd's matriarch, steps out into the river, proceeds about twenty yards and stops to look around. We are only 50 yards away, but we don't appear threatening and we don't make a sound. Slowly, other elephants join her and they wade out further into the river. Then come the babies, cradled in the crooks of their mothers' trunks. They don't swim but they sure appear to be enjoying the ride.

And now the first elephants in the parade are reaching the Zambia side of the river, where they either shake themselves like poodles or role on the ground, making happy grunts and bleats.

The herd takes about a half hour to make the crossing from Zimbabwe to Zambia, where they continue their trek.

The Guide powers up the outboard and we continue our trek too. But we will never forget the moments.

LA VIE EN ROSE

It was in the summer of 1960-something and I was living in Paris at 10 rue Guy Patin, in an arrondissement you don't want to visit, when I ran out of flints for my Ronson cigarette lighter. Despite the finest French language instruction at my prep school in Germantown and at college, no one had specifically covered the word for "flint."

I borrowed Lee's, my travelling-roomie's, LaRousse, and learned that the translation is "pierre a briquet" which, back-translated literally means "stones of brick." I also inveigled Lee into accompanying me one morning to the local "Tabac" where stamps, envelopes, cigarettes and such things were sold.

Upon entering the Tabac, we were surprised to see so many local Frenchman drinking liquor on their way to work. We assumed that café noir was the morning drink and Courvoisier was reserved for the evening. But we had never seen the poor side of Germantown, where "Baltimore Club" was breakfast.

The bar man takes my order – "je veaux des pierre a briquet, s'il vous plait," says I.

"Oui, oui," says lui, and he ushers outside the bar to a sidewalk table.

So, we sit. I light a Gauloise with the very last spark of my spent Ronson. It is 9 am and Lee and I admire the Parisians on their way to work, a place we will not have to go for many years.

And, here comes the garcon. He has on his tray two bottles of beer that he ceremoniously unveils, and pours into two frosted mugs. "Messieurs," quoth he, "deux bierres a brequenoes" as he bows his way back into the bar.

Lee looks at me. I look at him. We are nineteen years old. It is too early in every way to begin drinking alcohol. Tough brickees.

Ca va.