Fumbling and bumbling

BACK HOME, there’s a cough going ‘round and the woodwork needs painting. The gutters should be cleaned before the next rain. Someone is talking about driving 50 miles just to cut down a Christmas tree.

“They have this new thing now,” I tell my wife. “Tree lots.”

“But I think it’d be fun,” she says.

Fun isn’t as fun as it used to be. Fortunately, there is football. Touch football. Our national blast time. Our weekly fountain of goof.

“You guys ready?” someone asks before the first play.

“Just hike the ball,” says someone else.

“Hike.”

To watch a football game -- filled with blitzes and bloodshed, mayhem and ridicule -- you’d think the Germans had invented it. Yet football is us, as American as a cowboy sunset or a tool sale at Sears.

“Time out!” someone yells. “Time OUUUUUUT!!!”

The other team has called time out to set its defense. We are, to my knowledge, the only league in which players call time out before the very first play of the game.

“OK, hike,” someone finally says, and so we do.

It’s a friendly game, the sort of contest where there’s always time for encouragement or a kind word. When someone falls hard, a teammate is bound to say, “Get up, ya baby.” When someone tosses an interception, you hear, “Nice throw, Leinart.”

At one point, I stop to marvel at David’s running style, which is pretty much what you’d expect of an attorney who spends too much time sitting in conference rooms.

“You run,” I tell him, “like Peggy Fleming skates.”

“Thank you,” he says.

“You’re welcome.”

We have been doing this now for more than five years, through job changes and divorces, births and graduations. Till last year, our teenage sons were part of this Sunday afternoon madness. They’ve since graduated and moved on. Punks.

So now it’s mostly dads, who play more intensely than our bodies allow, who wake up still sore on Tuesday. By Wednesday, most of us are able to walk again. By Thursday, we can tie our own shoes. By Friday and Saturday, the soreness is almost entirely gone, except for the legs, buttocks and lower back.

Sunday, it starts all over again. You think UCLA has its hands full this weekend? Through 10 games, I have yet to stop Applebaum or Goldberg over the middle.

“You OK?” someone asks as I pause to cough up Connecticut.

“Never better,” I sputter.

“You’re bleeding,” someone notes.

“Where?”

“On your face.”

Not to worry. I have plenty of blood. It’s money I lack. Not to mention poise, brains and charisma.

More important, I lack breakaway speed and a big-time arm. All my passes are “touch” passes, meaning they are thrown gently, as if placing an ornament atop an unsteady tree. My signature play is a pass that hits a receiver in the back of the head. Hey, give me a break. I grew up watching the Bears.

The important thing is to keep improving. Each week, game summaries are e-mailed to every player: coaching critiques, scouting reports.

Injury reports too. Because we’re based in L.A., we trend toward a lot of players who work in “the arts,” which here means movies and TV. Accordingly, we’re a fragile, hollow-boned bunch. Our injury reports read like bistro menus heavy on poultry:

Fred: Knee

Scott: Breast

Don: Drumstick

(Fortunately, I used to be a doctor. Well, actually I played doctor a lot as a kid, that’s it. OK, so I was 23 and looking for fun things to do on dates. It’s still a medical background any way you look at it.)

“All right, listen up,” someone says in the huddle.

“Us?”

“You go short, you go long, you go short, you go long.”

“What about me?” three other guys ask.

“Same thing,” he says.

Like any shrewd veteran, I have carefully scouted my opponents’ every weakness: Larry has this thing for Asian women. Bill prefers the cheaper brands of gin.

Craig works too hard, even weekends. Bob dotes too much on his kids. Pete overspends on wine, mostly Cabernets.

Obviously, I haven’t been able to identify any tendencies on the football field itself, for I am all the time scouring the ground for my wire-rim glasses, which fall to the patchy sod on almost every play.

“I would be a much more dangerous player,” I tell my buddy Tom, “were I able to actually see.”

“You’d be awesome,” he says.

“Really think so?”

“No.”

Back home, a bedroom door needs painting. The car could use some oil. The Christmas lights await...

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.