THE SPECIALIST down at the local bone repair shop warns me that it can cause cancer, but I am of sturdy Anglo-American stock, with a smidgen of Dutch and Scotch and a tanker load of Bourbon thrown in, and I laugh in the face of danger, or at least giggle hysterically. Which is why I intend to continue going to cricket matches.

This is not cricket as in bug, or Jiminy. This is cricket as in a sport that to most Americans is as comprehensible as differential calculus, George Dubya's foreign policy or why they call it the funny bone when it smarts like hell if you give it a knock.

For those whose awareness of the world ends about 25 feet beyond the three-mile limit, cricket is to much of the old British Empire (anyone over 50 will know it as that vast expanse of pink splashed across global maps in their fifth-grade geography books) what baseball is to America (okay, include Canada if you must).

I grew up with the DiMaggios, the Detroit Tigers, 12-game losing streaks by the Knoxville Smokies and a homemade catcher's mask fashioned from coat hangers and a length of garden hose, but much of my adulthood has been spent in Vietnam and Hong Kong and Beirut, where the definition of a Louisville Slugger was a Kentucky thug.

In most alien venues, you could still get a pick-up game of baseball or football. But in Beirut, sports consisted of Tossing the Live Hand Grenade, the 100-Yard Dash from the Ticking Car Bomb and Minefield Hopscotch, so I was reduced to reading newspapers for more traditional sports fare, which is how I happened on cricket.

Fast Eddie, who ran the newsstand at the Commodore Hotel, was fanatic about the British soccer pools, and the newspapers we got reflected this - almost all British, awash in soccer shenanigans. Baseball coverage was in the same league with curling, Eskimo smooching and Thai kickboxing. That is to say, zilch.

Desperate for any sport involving ball and bat, I picked up the sports section of London's Daily Telegraph and zeroed in on a story that started: "Geoffrey Boycott scored an unbeaten 127, including a straight drive for six off a googly from Roger Harper, before he was trapped plumb LBW by a Joel Garner yorker. . ."

. . . and so on, for about a thousand words. I didn't understand a single sentence.

What I felt was the sort of helpless bewilderment you get upon being confronted with the Lorenz-Fitzgerald Equation, a road map of Lower Rectum-on-the-Wold in Urdu or the instruction manual for assembling a doll house for an ankle biter. This was particularly painful to someone who prided himself on being reasonably intelligent and who moreover understood every Mad magazine and Batman comic book he ever read.

It took me many moons, but I finally deciphered what had happened to poor Geoff Boycott that day. In baseball terms, it amounted to being called out on strikes.

(Boycott is a walking case of elephantiasis of the ego noted mainly for his agonizingly slow rate of run scoring. In his home county of Yorkshire - Britain's answer to Texas - an Indian restaurant came up with the Geoffrey Boycott curry: you still get the runs, but it takes a lot longer.)

What I came away with was an appreciation of, then a passion for, a pastime that combines a high-scoring sports competition with a sort of rolling picnic spread over a kind of holiday that can last up to five days. This is Test cricket, the World Series of the sport.

Its Yankee Stadium - or perhaps more like the Brooklyn Dodgers' old Ebbets Field - is Lord's cricket ground in London, an arena that appears to have been designed by an Indian maharajah, a yacht builder or a fancy pastry chef, depending on which direction you happen to be looking.

Going to a Test match is a special occasion second only, in these parts, to attending the Queen's Tea Party at Buckingham Palace (or maybe the Tea Party is second - I forget which). For the annual one at Lord's, I strap on what is perhaps the world's ugliest club tie, and off I go for eight hours or so of stuffing myself with egg mayonnaise sandwiches, working crossword puzzles and snoozing, between bouts of bat meeting ball.

This is not an occasion without peril. The skin specialist I am seeing insists that, because of one tiny blister, I am risking an early visit from the Grim Reaper. Aside from the fact that I'll simply refuse to answer the door, I find it hard to take any supposed threat of cancer of the ear lobe seriously.

Cricket is like baseball in that there are two teams involved and a ball and a bat (actually, in cricket's case, two bats) are used. Cricket differs from baseball in that there's no such thing as a foul ball, each team has 11 players, it has two "home plates" (called wickets) with a batsman (not batter) at each, and a team scoring 700 runs does not necessarily win.

But my intent here is not to explain the game of cricket (mainly because to do so would take another 26,793 words). Rather, it is to convey some feel for a pastime that most Americans would consider so alien that it needs another planet, but which has the magic that escapes so many sports these days - the ability to make it a fun day out.

Still, if it's an explanation of cricket that you desire, here's a capsule version that someone much brighter than I on the subject once offered up:

"You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.

"When both sides have been in and out and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game."

Meanwhile, that tie I mentioned comes in brownish-red and yellow stripes, the colors of the Marylebone Cricket Club, which runs the Lord's ground. I am an associate member of the MCC and have been waiting for full membership since July 1986.

I'm told I can expect to get it in August 2007. That should be in time to etch on my tombstone, alongside "He failed to put sunscreen on his ear. . ."

Thought for the Week: Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away and barefoot.

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