Editor's Note: Greg Kincaid is a practicing lawyer, specializing in divorce and family law mediation. He is the author of Tantric Coconuts. For Biographile's That Summer series, in which authors share personal stories on the summers that shaped them or their subjects, Greg remembers a summer where he worked his tail off to earn himself a blue '66 Mustang.

Today, there is dearth of ritual for older boys passing into manhood. Many argue that without ceremonies to mark this important passage, boys will always be boys.

Forty years ago, I had a summer of manhood, a rite of passage. It was an ordeal where the boy in me had to die a little to make room for an emerging man. I was fifteen and it was the summer before my sophomore year of high school.

There were two goals that summer. First, save enough money to buy a decent car. Second, survive the first day of football practice -- it started with a timed one-mile run that an older friend described as “a puke fest.”

I had heard of something called “getting in shape,” so I thought I would try it. The Kansas rural roads are set out in one-mile grids so I would get up in the morning, go out a mile, and come back. While a tolerable practice, jogging did not pay well.

For a Kansas farm kid, without a car, forty or fifty years ago, there was only one job. It started in early July and was over within about six weeks. It was called “putting up hay.” Briefly, the farmer cut, raked, and bailed the hay into about eighty pounds of pollen drenched, bumblebee infested, rectangular-sized bales. A hay crew of three young men might earn six or seven cents a bale for the task of picking up the hay, stacking it on a tractor-drawn wagon, and then unloading and carefully re-stacking the hay, one bale at a time, typically in the hottest and most poorly ventilated back corner of an old barn’s hayloft.

At the end of the day, I remember standing in the shower with my nose running nonstop from allergies, my skin scraped raw from the grass, blisters all over my hands and the muscles in my arms quivering in exhaustion. I’d made twelve dollars. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The paltry pay for the backbreaking labor was the crying part. The wonderful feeling of having done “a man’s day of work” was terrific. As the summer progressed, my body slowly changed. Muscles appeared where there had only been skinny little boy arms.

When the summer was nearly over, I took all of my savings, augmented by the earnings from my summer of sweat, and bought a gorgeous little blue '66 Mustang. I spent hours every day washing the car and then just sitting in it, presumably imagining how cool I looked behind the wheel.

Three days before football practice started, I got up early on a wet and rainy August morning and drove to the small town of Gardner, Kansas to get a physical. I returned with a piece of paper that said I could play football, but without my car. I drove too fast around a tight bend on a wet road and totaled the car a week after I bought it. The car was my badge of manhood and now that had been taken away from me.

A few days later, I showed up, dismayed, for the first day of puke fest. I was a lowly sophomore standing in the shadows of the older and much larger students, the real athletes, the quarterbacks and the streaky fast wide receivers. They lined up and shot off when the coach blew the whistle. I just chugged along, content to finish. At the half-mile mark, I found myself still chugging, right past one real athlete after another.

Although far from brilliant, I wasn't a stupid kid. Shaming a bunch of seniors that outweighed me by fifty pounds on the first day of football practice was not a sound survival strategy. Out of nearly one hundred young men, I finished third without much effort. I’m pretty sure I could have won that race.

One evening after practice, I stared at the wrecked mustang that now sat in our barn and smiled. Something obvious had somehow gotten past me. If you get up and run a mile and then turn around and run back, you run two miles. I had over trained. I connected the dots between more effort and more success.

I don’t care too much about cars and shiny things. If you’re not careful, you can lose them on a rainy day, but I still try to go out and run a mile or two very day. It was a good place for a young man to start and an excellent place for an older man to return.