Summer of the Barrel

     In the second chapter of Feels Like the First Time, I wrote about an old  barrel that my friend Mark Panter and I used to keep ourselves amused over the course of an entire summer.  I honestly don't know how big that barrel was, but it was big enough that two good-sized teenagers could stand on it and still have room to maneuver. My step-Dad had brought this barrel home and leaned it up against the back garden shed  a year or two before, and there it had sat. Whatever project he had imagined for it never materialized.
     I don't know whatever lead Mark and I to tip that barrel over the first time.  Sheer boredom would be my best guess. When we did tip it over, all the rust that had formed inside broke loose and moved around the inside, making an appealing sound. In the book I said it sounded like an Indian Rain Stick, and that's pretty close. It was that sound that led Mark and I to investigate more thoroughly. If it had tipped over quietly, that probably would have been its final resting place.
     Instead, Mark and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows and in a moment of mutual understanding, we pried it loose from the grass that had grown up around it and pushed it out onto the lawn between our houses.  Every revolution of the barrel resulted in a musical shoosh, shoosh, shoosh.
     I don't remember which one of us had the brilliant idea to jump up on it and see if we could move it with our feet. It was probably Mark. He was always the more adventurous of the two of us. Whichever it was, we found that our tennis shoes gave us enough traction that if we stood on the very edge of the barrel, it would roll along the flat grass. As soon as we discovered that, it felt like magic had invaded our otherwise lackadaisical summer.
     By the end of the day, we had devised all kinds of games to play on the barrel. The easiest was to have both of us stand on top and, using only our feet, try desperately to throw the other one to the ground by stopping, starting and changing the direction the barrel traveled. But, we also marked off a course and timed how fast we could move the barrel from one end to the other. It was like a Barrel Olympics. 
    If we had rolled the barrel as much as we could for a while, we tipped it up on end and used it as Home Base for a game of Werewolf. If you never played Werewolf as a kid, you missed out. It was like Hide 'n Seek on steroids, with an element of playacting thrown in for good measure.  Because the barrel was metal, it would get hot during the day, and we loved to sit with our backs against its' warmth as the day cooled. Mark and I would soak up the last remaining bits of warmth and tell each other stories and lies. Lies, mostly, but all in good fun. 
     It makes me a little sad to realize that if I had been born in 2000 instead of 1960, I would never have had the Summer of the Barrel. Instead, Mark and I would have been playing XBox, listening to our iPods and updating our Facebook statuses all day. And... I would have had many less happy memories to look back on today.
     How about you? Any special, odd things you did to occupy yourself during those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer during your youth? 
     Also, before I forget, the contest is still running to get one of two signed copies of Feels Like the First Time. Details below: a Rafflecopter giveaway