Fallen leaves turn grocery-bag brown and scrabble across sidewalks like ghosts of summer. Bare trees point skeletal fingers at the sky and warn of winter. But they are mocked by each balmy grasshopper day of Indian summer that drifts by like a sunshine-golden maple leaf on the spicy breeze of autumn.

        Ahhh, fall. It's the time of year I missed most while living in the Arizona desert.

        It's the time of year when families gather and warm their souls around the hearth of shared love.

        It's the time of year when men in grubby T-shirts and baggy sweatpants lay down their leaf rakes and wander off to join in an ancient tribal ritual to test their courage and healing ability by running into each other at fool speed, keeping score in pulled muscles, purple bruises and torn cartilage.

        Yes, it's the time of year for bone-crunching “touch” football, the favorite sport of men who should know better.

        Our church organized a Thanksgiving game a week ago, and I am still thanking God that I was able to get out of bed the next day. I had to pick up my feet with both hands to put on socks. Now I know how an old pair of tennis shoes feels after banging in the dryer for three hours.

        It was Young Guys under 40 vs. the soon-to-be crippled, delusional Old Guys. We played flag football, which means defenders must pretend to pull the ball-carrier's flag while hitting him like a gravel truck running over a squirrel on I-75.

        We had referees, but they couldn't stop laughing long enough to throw a flag. And some penalties were puzzling.

        I've seen hands on hips: offsides. I've seen right hand gripping left forearm: holding. But I've never seen left hand on hip, right hand wobbling on imaginary cane: too many old men on the field.

        I was glad to stop getting in the way and head for the sidelines, where I joined the walking wounded and contemplated the way the human body can conspire with time to dress up your pride in a clown suit and walk it around in public like a circus bear on a leash.

        As a kid I broke my arm playing “touch” football and the worst I remember was an itchy cast. For men over 40, the same injury takes slightly longer to heal. Something like “the rest of your life” is not unusual.

        “Typically, what happens is that calcium goes into your bones until age 21, then it tends to start leaking out because of hormonal changes,” explained Dr. Dan Funk, medical director for the Orthopedic Service Line at the Health Alliance. “As we age, calcium leaking out makes the bones more brittle.”

        After 40, we're also a quart low on periosteum — the tissue that covers bones and supplies blood. In children, it is “very vascular and provides a lot of blood supply,” Dr. Funk said. “As we get older it gets thinner and less vascular and the healing response time slows down.”

        Muscles slow down, too, and tighten like clay in a kiln — or in my case, Play Doh. After just a few hours of football fun, my muscles felt like the clay candy dish I made in 6th grade, after my Uncle Frank put his cigar out in it.

        The knees start running rough too: “Cartilage tends to decrease in thickness,” said Dr. Funk. “It's sort of like an old frying pan that has been used a lot. Our "Teflon' isn't as thick as when we started out.”

        Dr. Funk has done surgery on enough injured patients to know how the human body humbles us as it ages. He did not participate in the turkey bowl game. Hmmm. Looks like someone passed that IQ test and it wasn't me.

        But I know this: People are not unlike trees in the forest. We have our seasons, from supple saplings who spike the ball and run up the score, to thick old oaks with hands like boards who crash to the ground on frying-pan knees and wonder: Where did the summer go?

        Contact Enquirer Associate Editor Peter Bronson at 768-8301; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: pbronson@enquirer.com. Cincinnati.Com keyword: Bronson.

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