Caps
Maybe I’m out of touch, but can kids today still buy those tiny explosive caps, and the cap guns that use them? Or, are they outlawed as dangerous, or something? Or, maybe re-branded, like how candy cigarettes became silly “candy sticks.” When we were kids, we could buy caps in the convenience store. I don't know where the cap guns came from - maybe they were in the convenience store, too. But I remember having more fun blasting the caps by banging them with a rock than by actually loading them into a cap gun. The kids who had cap guns or rockets were some kind of fancy-pants rich kids. Anyway, the gun was slow and tedious to load, and the rockets were unreliable. Using a rock to set off the powder worked just fine - even better than a hammer. The flat surface of the hammer head didn’t promise ignition the way the jagged edge of a rock did.
The gunpowder smell felt deliciously masculine. Real outdoorsy boy stuff. The smell of the powder clung to our fingers and lingered in the air like the memory of a battle.
What are cap guns, cap pistols used for, anyway? Track and field starter pistol, or maybe a device to scare away nuisance animals.