Bottle caps
Between the ages of 7 and 10, bottle caps featured prominently in my life. Every single school day, the lowly bottle cap served as the primary source of entertainment for my friends and me. Some days, the object that was so readily available from the school canteen served as our soccer ball. Hopeful Maradonas and Peles gathered behind the primary school hall, ten, sometimes twenty a side, to try to slot, slam or slide the bottle caps into the opposition’s goal. The squeak of rubber-soled shoes on hard cement, the yelps when a foul occurred and the cheers accompanying each successful attempt on goal were the soundtracks that augmented the furious action on our cement field. The sharp edges of the bottle caps sometimes played the role of unwitting scalpel, slicing someone’s leg as it whizzed by at speed. When a bottle cap got crushed under the weight of a misguided attempt to clear it from defense (or rifle it into goal), its replacement was just a short run to the canteen away.
Another game that we frequently played was something we only knew as “bottle caps”. The accompanying video shows how the game is played. It was a simple game that rewarded manual dexterity and a light touch, and kept us entertained for hours. Circles of my friends would gather in our assembly area to play, each one resembling a mini stadium. Fine moves were rewarded with a loud “WAH!!!!”, attempts to cheat, with “WOI!!!”, the occasional “I don’t want to play with you anymore” and occasionally, ostracism for the offender.
I never thought much about the games we played with bottle caps, but in retrospect, there’s so much I learned while engaging in those games. Lessons about honor, integrity and relationships. Lessons about the value of deliberate practice. Lessons about simplicity and creativity. I’m convinced that in the innocence of our childhood lie many hidden lessons about how we can approach our lives. The simple bottle cap helped unlock those lessons for me. What games did you play as a child, and what lessons did you learn, and can you learn from them?