"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Thursday, January 9
Not Quite Cricket, But There It Is
Last summer I moved from Shreveport to Allen, Texas, just north of Plano (which itself is just north of Dallas). Now I had heard that as much as 10% of the US population was born in a foreign country, but in Shreveport you really don't see many immigrants. North Dallas is different. I have met more foreign-born people in the last six months than I met in six years in Shreveport, and most of them are not from where you would expect. There is a large population from Mexico and Latin America, of course, but most of the immigrants living in my area hail from the Middle East (Egypt, Saudi Arabia) and Central Asia (India and Pakistan). That can lead to some pretty strange scenes to American eyes.
As I was driving home from church a couple of weeks ago I passed a large park complex. They hold events there all the time, especially softball (for grownups) and soccer (for the kids). I noticed some people playing a game on this day, but at first it didn't look familiar to me, so I took a closer look. It looked like baseball at first, but all the players were wearing white button-down shirts and long white pants...
Cricket! They were playing cricket. I'd never even heard of a cricket match here in the states before, and certainly not in Dallas, so I was surprised, but secretly a little pleased. The idea that people wanted to move to my country in such numbers that they could get together a couple of teams to play the most obscure sport in the great state of Texas made me, well, proud to be an American. My immigration policy: if people want to move here that badly - let 'em! Most foreign-born Americans come here to work hard and get ahead, not (as many would have it) to lounge around and live on Welfare. "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free." Right on, man.
