KICK THE CAN

When I was a kid, my favorite outdoor game to play was Kick the Can. If you've never played this, it goes like this: You get a can - hopefully someone would get a nice big coffee can or juice can, but if not you settled for just a canned vegetable or fruit can. Then one person is the seeker. They stand with their eyes closed, and one foot on the can and count to 100. All the other people go hide. After the seeker has reached 100, he/she goes to find the people. Now this is the tricky part, because you can't let youself get too far away from the can. While the seeker is trying to find the hiders, the hiders are trying to work their way to the can so they can kick it and yell: Olly, Olly, Oxen Free! I have no idea who Olly is or why the Oxen are free. :0) Then all the hiders come in and you start a new game and the person who was the seeker has to be it again. If you have a really stupid person, they can be the seeker the whole time. If the seeker sees someone trying to sneak in to kick the can, he/she runs back to the can, puts his/her foot on it and points to the person and yells something like You're Out or something like that. I can't really remember what you say. Then the person who was caught has to sit out while the seeker goes out to find someone else. If the seeker finds anyone in their hiding place, they are out too and have to sit out.

One day we decided to play Kick the Can. We always thought it was loads more fun if you had lots of people, so we would try to get as many kids as possible to play. This one day we decided to go all the way down the block and knock on all the doors and ask the kids to come play Kick the Can with us. By the time we got to the end of the block we had quite a few kids - at least 15. We went to the second to the last house on the block (the very last house only had babies). No one answered the door, but someone said they thought they saw the curtain move. Well you know what great imaginations a bunch of kids have. The moving of the curtain escalated to us deciding that someone must be in their house trying to rob it. We weren't going to let anyone rob our friend's house, so we all decided we would surround the house and then one of the older boys would pretend like he was a cop and yell and tell the supposed robber inside that he was surrounded and he should give himself up. This sounded like a great plan. We thought for sure that if we did this, that the robber would try to sneak out the back door, so those of us who were more "in charge" went to the backyard and we designated other kids to surround the front. What we didn't count on was that the ones we put in the front were scaredy-cats and so they snuck back around to the back to be with us. After the police-impersonator called out for the robber to give himself up because we had surrounded him, someone said they thought they heard the garage door. We all ran around to the front, but the garage door was down. We surmised that he must have gotten away. Just then our neighbors came home. They had been to the grocery store and as they were getting groceries out, we bombarded them with the story of a robber in their house. The lady was a good sport and let all of us go from room to room to "make sure" that there were no robbers in her house.