THERE COMES a time in every man's life when he surveys the wreckage of his years and determines it's time to mend a few of the bits and pieces. Which is why, now that my aging brain cells have bid fond adieu to rational thought, I've decided to take up skiing and to go back to university.

With any sort of luck, good or bad, I should get my bachelor of science degree in time to have the letters engraved on my tombstone and my various bones should have healed sufficiently to get me comfortably into the coffin without splints, slings or plaster casts.

Don't get me wrong. My athleticism is in the same league as that Olympic swimmer from Africa who took the better part of a couple of lunch breaks to splash one length of a 50-meter pool, and when it comes to studying I have the attention span of a gnat with hemorrhoids.

It's just that these two areas of human endeavor - getting down a mountain on a pair of planks and getting a set of smart-looking initials after my name - have long been sources of frustration. Now I've got the time, the wherewithal and an appropriate lack of any sense of self-preservation to do something about it.

Despite what my wife Elizabeth claims, skiing is not a dangerous sport. It's just that when I've tried it, it somehow manages to look like Russian roulette at 60 miles per hour. Also unhelpful, as any reader of this column knows, is my hatred of snow, except on Christmas cards and on the polar regions of Mars.

In fact, I learned to ski (in a very loose sense of that phrase) not on snow, but on plastic, down an artificial ski run at Alexandra Palace, in north London. The skin burns from plastic are impressive and unrivaled on Alpine slopes. They also take a lot longer to heal.

A few years later, I was ready for the real thing and hied myself to Avoriaz, a ski resort in the French Alps. I was kitted out with planks and poles and a brand new tan ski suit, and climbed aboard one of the lifts to take me up the mountain to start my first downhill run.

As I stood there at the top, I realized that a ski slope is called a "piste" probably because that's what you need to be to go down one. What had looked from afar like a gentle slope that even ankle-biters could maneuver now took on the aspect of a cliff face with patches of snow and ice to cross on a very steep path to certain doom.

I closed my eyes and set off, with the words of an old Chad Mitchell Trio ditty alive in my head: "Oh, they called him Super Skier as he sat around the sundeck and swore that he would never take a spill; when they finally got him down, they had to use two toboggans to carry all the pieces down the hill. . ."

In fact, after 14 spills on the way, I got down relatively intact and all the purples and reds and blues of the bruises and snow burns were gone in six days or so. I also had, alas, learned nothing - I went back for another try two years later, at the nearby French resort of Morzine.

My style of skiing derives from the kamikaze school - complete mastery of the straightforward, complete ignorance of anything involving turning, and near-total reliance on a crash as the most dependable method of stopping. The art was amply demonstrated on my first, and last, run at Morzine.

At the top, my eyes were tightly shut in kamikaze fashion, and I set up with a sharp swerve to the left, toward a small bridge crossing a busy road. With appropriate warning cries of "Andalay!" or "Fore!" or maybe it was "I want my momma," I missed a couple smooching and plowed into the side of a Quonset hut.

Undeterred, I staggered around the hut and found myself staring into the heart of downtown Morzine about 300 yards beyond the elderly couple walking their dog whom I was headed to. Fortunately, they dropped the dog's leash before my skis could snag it and jerk the poor creature to Jesus.

I nicked a telephone pole instead, then veered across the footpath (I had long since parted company with the ski run) and narrowly avoided going over a 240-foot cliff before getting my bearings for the final slide to an ass-over-teakettle crash landing in Morzine's business district.

I've had the ensuing 28 years to ponder what went wrong and why. Mine is an older and wiser head now, and I'm ready to book a few days at a ski resort to have another go.

In fact, I'm looking at brochures - but I'm keeping them away from Elizabeth for the time being. She still won't let me buy even a pair of rollerblades, so some convincing is in order.

Meanwhile, after a 47-year break, I'm back to school in a few days, a first-year student at Britain's Open University, enrolled in S103, "Discovering Science." My long-range goal is a Bachelor of Science degree. My short-range goal is to get a passing mark in S103.

That is by no means a certainty. This course takes in about everything in the universe, including a whole potful of stuff that not even Einstein knew anything about the last time I cracked a textbook, like microchips and black holes and string theory and computer crashes and how bad TV could really get.

Actually, when I was last at school, as a freshman at Duke, I didn't devote a lot of time to the study ethic, majoring as I was in extracurricular activities such as working on the Duke Chronicle as a reporter and writing ads for the campus radio station WDBS and trying to persuade Sonny Jurgensen to play on the House G softball team.

Now I've got this great stack of OU reading material in front of me, and a wife casting her beady eyes in my direction to make sure I'm indeed cramming for the old exams.

Ah, well, maybe it's time to hit the old slopes and clear the mental pathways. There's always time to get back to the books while recuperating in the hospital.

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