Kick the Can | Diet and Exercise | Real Life Fitness | PhitZone

Warm weather is rolling in. Kids are out of school. We hear them playing outside into the evening. The sounds of summer have begun.

There is one sound that is nothing but a distant memory – a can skidding on the pavement, as somebody punts it down the road. Today, we’re talking Kick the Can.

This was just one of the ways that we spent countless summer nights under the street lamps of our neighborhood. Hide & Seek, Tag, football or baseball. And the ever so un-politically correct – Smear the Queer.

My specialty, however, was found in the art of kicking that can. I certainly wasn’t the fastest of the gang. That honor fell on Carl, who lived across the street. I wasn’t the slowest either. That would have been Jon. His brother Billy, my best friend at the time, would have been the runt. I was possibly the roughest of the four of us, although Jon might take exception to that.

The idea and rules of the game are simple – One of us would start out as “It”. That is a foreign concept to kids today. We wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.

“It” would place the can at home base. Usually this would be somewhat close to “jail’. He’d count to 50 as the other would go hide. When 50 was reached, the hunt begins.

In tamer versions, when “it” finds somebody, they call out their name. Now it’s game on as the hider attempts to kick the can before they are captured, and put in jail.

When I say captured, this would start off with tagging the players. By the end of the evening, captured took on a whole new meaning that usually involved a tackle that would make Jack Lambert look like a punk.

If you were captured, you had to go to jail, and wait. If you were lucky, one of your friends would sneak in, kick the can, and break you out. Otherwise, you had to wait for the game to end. If you were the first one in jail, you were the next one to be ‘it’.

Where are these games now? Are kids just not that imaginative, or are they too busy playing on their Wii? Want to know what’s really sad? I went to you tube, where you can find a video of just about anybody doing anything. Nothing showed up for Kick the Can. Well, there were a couple of some kids throwing flip-flops at a can, but I’m not sure why?

What kinds of games did you play as a kid? If you have kids, are you teaching them how to play? Or, are we responsible for not allowing our kids to play like this, as we guard them from every bump and bruise?

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