Touch Football

When I was growing up Autumn afternoons, like the one we are having today in the Northeast, were devoted to touch football. The games on Saturdays and Sundays were usually played at Willard School on a field comprised mostly in our imaginations, and one which bears little resemblance to the neatly manicured field that exists today.

We played on a field with no markers and which was largely composed of dirt. The out-of-bounds marker on one side was based upon the upright posts of a metal fence on California Street. The other out-of-bounds marker was more specific because it was the stone wall which abutted the school itself.

The dimensions of the field mattered very little to us because the game itself was more important. If only the fathers of today would take these words to heart, they could have saved themselves a ton of tax dollars spent sprucing up fields which required no maintenance other than cutting the grass in the summer. Such is the irony of life.

We only lived for the game in those days and didn't care how the field looked or was designed. There were rainy days we played and reveled mostly in the mud we accumulated on our cloths. Not that our mothers, who had to wash our cloths, had the same feeling but they at least understood where we had been and what we had been doing. These seemingly innocent games were rights of passage and nothing was going to stop us, except the eventual coming of snow in winter. We might have marveled at the Professionals who played through the "Ice Bowls" in Green Bay, Wisconsin but we would only carry this admiration just so far. When it was too cold to throw or catch the ball the Touch Football season was over.

Now that I have lived a half century the Touch Football season is long over. I tried to play at the annual Turkey Day Game at Glen Field on Thanksgiving but my body in the late 1990s had long since betrayed me, and the exhilaration was gone.

My friends still keep the tradition of touch football going each and every Thanksgiving, so if you are in the vicinity of Glen School around 10:00 AM next Thanksgiving you should stop in, that is, if your body will permit.