Ah man, now we can’t play no more

When we were young we used to play all the ball games at our cul-de-sac, baseball, basketball, kickball. Along the curb of the cul-de-sac was a rain gutter. We would play until the ball would roll into that gutter and then if we didn’t have a back-up ball we were done playing for the day and we had to wait for our dad to get home. We would wait to see his pick up truck pulling in the driveway and then we would go out in the garage and tell him and he would get a crowbar out of his toolbox and walk over to the top of the gutter and loop it under the handle of the big heavy metal sewer cover. Then one of us would have to go down the ladder into the bottom of the sewer to get the ball. It was real scary down there, just a concrete shaft going about 10 feet down. Then at the bottom of the shaft, there was a hole about one or 2 feet wide where the water flowed through. One time I looked down the hole and it was just black. I could see no end and I imagined having to crawl all the way through it and shuddered. Then I would climb back up the ladder with the ball and my dad would move the big heavy cover back into place until it would fall with a heavy clink into its circular place.