Bucket Brigade

This afternoon I found myself fondly remembering a scene from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Butch is arguing with his rival Harvey Logan about the rules of their pending knife fight. "Rules? In a knife fight? No rules!" bellows Logan, just before Butch finishes the fight in his own inimitable fashion.
What set me to thinking of this interchange was hearing the neighborhood children chasing one another up and down the street in front of my house with a variety of containers full of water. More to the point, they were briefly full, then suddenly empty on this hottest day of the year so far. One little girl, with Gatorade bottle at the ready was loudly insisting, "Don't wet me! I can't get wet!"
Well, if ever there was an innate challenge to the logic and senses of anyone under five feet tall, this is it. You say you "can't get wet"? I believe there is a very abrupt and gratifying way to test this assertion. Of course you can get wet, you probably shouldn't, and something tells me that standing outside with your bottle of water in attack position isn't the best defense against dampness.
We had a family like that on the street where I grew up. Right about the time the first squirt guns showed up for the season, they were the ones to escalate things. They liked buckets and hoses. Don't get me wrong, when it comes to water fights, I believe firepower is extremely important. But here's the rub: These guys would inevitably show up early, douse some unsuspecting victim, only to run screaming for the relative safety of their own front yard, screaming, "I can't get wet!" This usually had something to do with the fact that they went to Catholic school and were often still wearing their uniforms into the early evening. Not that there was much discussion about whether or not their targets were "allowed" to be soaked. I had my share of Garanimals drenched by these miscreants, and I always imagined a day when I would have my revenge.
Sadly, that day never came. Something about the way justice was meted out in our neighborhood never allowed it. Maybe later in life they ended up on "America's Funniest Home Videos" as the buffoon on the receiving end of an above-the-ground-pool mishap, but I never got to see it. On reflection, I can only say that I am glad that I was always one of those kids who could get wet. It's a real character-builder.