Kick the Can

Kids love adventure, and kick-the-can is great adventure. We used to play all the time behind “Jetro” Haendler’s house, the middle of a long stretch of fence-less backyards. A tennisball can was stood by the backyard’s big tree, also the sight of the “jail”, and whoever was “it” would try to spot players and capture them by tapping the can three times saying, “One, Two, Three I see so-and-so,” before so-and-so could run up and kick the can first (setting everybody in jail free). There was a favorite hiding place in our game, at the far corner of Jetro’s house, where you could crawl around and spy like an assassin, watching for “it” to focus his search for sneaking players in the opposite direction, then jumping into a mad-dash attack of the can. One game, I was crawling around the side of Jetro’s house and made an unfortunate discovery as my hand squashed horribly in an unfairly placed pile of dog crap. I jumped up in disgust, and was immediately jailed by whoever was “it”. Grossed out, repulsed, ready to barf, I watched other players make the same discovery as me, and giggled uncontrollably, though I suffered the same. That game, we shit-handed victims couldn’t wait for the last player to be captured. We couldn’t wait to finish our jail sentence and run home to scrub the crap out of our hands… but scrub fast, for adventure was waiting.