Kickycan
Happy Birthday Kicky, this is for you:
The Lost Art of Can-Kicking
Bill Thomas, Scripps Howard News Service
This won't mean much to a generation that gets its kicks in cyberspace. But to older folks who grew up in the first half of the 20th century - folks who remember the Great Depression as a time when can-kicking ran neck-and-neck with baseball as our national pastime - this will come as unsettling news.
Although it once would have been impossible for a kid to grow up in America without kicking a can, that time has passed. I have made an unofficial study of today's otherwise normal youngsters - their caps turned backward, their shorts drooping, rings hanging from this and that - and I have not seen one of them stop, take aim and kick a can into their own immediate future.
When I was a kid, this would have been cause for alarm - a sign of a disturbed, depressed or distracted child who had lost his focus. For growing up without kicking a can was like turning 13 without having smoked grapevine, spat watermelon seeds, eaten an earthworm on a dare or played music on a comb and toilet paper.
I don't know when or why can-kicking fell out of fashion. Maybe it had something to do with recycling. Maybe it's because kids don't walk everywhere like they used to. Or maybe it's that they no longer know what to do with simple things that don't come from stores and have directions.
For example: I don't know if kids still hunt for four-leaf clovers, make whiskers and mustaches out of corn silk, catch doodlebugs and horny toads and squeeze grasshoppers till they spit tobacco juice.
In hard times, kids picked up ordinary, everyday things and transformed them into toys that were one part junk and three parts imagination. Scraps of wood and bands of inner tube became rubber guns. Y-shaped forks of tree limbs were made into slingshots. Two 2-by-4s were turned into stilts, and, the most readily available and moveable toy of all, the tin can was the basis of a game involving skill, fancy footwork and endurance.
Can-kicking, I suspect, was more of a big bang than a process of evolution. It happened like this:
Back then, kids walked or ran everywhere they went - to school, to the store, to the picture show, to the vacant lot where unchaperoned games of baseball, football and civil war broke out on weekday afternoons and all day on Saturdays.
As these kids walked or ran toward their various destinations, they kicked cans as a way of moving from place to place without thinking about it. It was Zen and the Art of Can-Kicking. It was meditation on the go. And, despite its mindlessness, there was something magical about it.
The beauty of can kicking, it seems to me, was its power of transformation. One minute you'd be walking down the street with nothing to do but think about girls and worry about your acne, and the next minute a can would be lying in your path. In that moment, you would be transformed into a pure kicking machine whose only purpose was to move an empty tin can from one place to another.
The first move was always a foregone conclusion: A kid is there, a can is there and the rest is nature: Without plan or hesitation, the kid draws back his foot and gives the can a boot that sends it clattering down the street a distance of 10, 15, 20 yards. And before it stops, he's already lining up the next shot.
One of the hardest places to kick a can was on the way to church. Mothers hated can-kicking anyway because it wore out one shoe early. Also, they seemed to believe that can-kicking was disturbing the peace, and this being the Sabbath, that made it sinful. Kids, however, were sure that God had arranged for the can to be there - I mean that's the kind of thing God did for kids, wasn't it? - and so they felt it was their heavenly duty to kick any can they happened to find.
Actually, tin cans weren't all that plentiful back then. Soda pop and beer came in bottles. Home-canned vegetables came in Mason jars. So an empty tin can lying around on the street was a shining opportunity.
I started thinking about this recently when I heard that the Slinky - that store-bought coil of wire that walks down steps - had made it into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Although I have nothing against the Slinky - I mean if you want to watch a roll of wire slither down stairs, it's OK with me - but I have to wonder if the tin can shouldn't have made it into the Hall of Fame first.
After all, it has history and tradition on its side. And, being a free expression of youthful energy, it certainly gave a generation of kids more bang for their buck, more run for their money.
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Bill Thomas writes for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, TN.
