According to the old story, if you toss a ball at a non-American, he will try to stop it with his feet.

If you throw a ball at an American, he likely will catch it in his hands.

I have not played catch in a very long time. Certainly, not since before leaving for Abu Dhabi, in 2009.

But that situation will change soon. At least in theory.

Being shipped to France, along with our more prosaic stuff …

… are two baseball gloves and an “official” California League baseball.

Not much baseball going on here. France is not a particularly sporty country and baseball is not on the radar of even the most international of sports fans. (L’Equipe, the French sports newspaper, seems to post a baseball story about once a month.) And baseball equipment is nonexistent at sporting goods stores here.

That is why we are shipping over the two gloves and the ball.

We could have tried to cram the ball gear into the smallish suitcases when we returned to France from California in early June, but we were already over the airline baggage weight limit.

Clothes and Costco booty pushed the baseball equipment into the slow boat from Long Beach to France. (Five hundred acetaminophen tablets are surprisingly heavy.)

We prepared for this notional game of catch by buying a smallish glove (to go with an even smaller glove) at the Sports Authority going-outta-business sale, back in SoCal. The ball was a pleasant discovery in a storage facility where I had dumped stuff ahead of Abu Dhabi.

So, we’re set … depending on tides, and how soon the shipper can fill up a container that will bring the stuff over.

A clearing for a soccer field, rarely used, is about a 10-minute walk away, here in our small town in the south of France, and that would work well for catch — enough weeds on the ground to keep the ball from rolling far.

And we could amaze the locals by attempting to catch a thrown ball with our hands … rather than “handle” it with our feet.