“I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things ’n I have succeeded fairly well.”  Rob’t Benchley

King of the hill is definitely not a team sport but you can’t play it alone…

Noah told his mother that Grandpa John must’a had a terrible childhood ‘cuz he didn’t have any video games or even a television~’n that’s true, we didn’t have any of those things….Grandpa John explained that in lieu of ‘those things’ that he had to use his imagination, for example, a stick.  Grandpa John told him that a stick c’d be many things ~ a gun, a sword, even a horse…I’m told that Noah just shook his head ’n felt sorry for the old man….

While it’s true that we didn’t have ‘stuff’ to play with, we lived in a village where everyone knew everyone else ’n we could wander from dawn to dusk without fear ~ we had the Ohio River ’n the riverbank wuz sandy ’n overgrown with willows ’n water maples ’n you never knew what the river would serve up….’n the other direction brought us to the hills, tall, steep, ’n covered in honeysuckle….

And every time you c’d get three or more t’gether, one of the fav’rite games wuz ‘King of the Hill’….there wuz a spot overlooking the curve in the two-lane blacktop that separated the village from the hills that wuz steep ’n hard to climb but had a sandy outcrop close to the top….it wuz two or maybe three wide at its widest ’n maybe four feet long ’n we c’d fight for hours to maintain the position of King of the Hill…well, I told you we didn’t have toys ’n suchlike…it wuz an age of make-do….’n not only for the kids, for adults also…it definitely wuz not a ‘disposable’ age…A money source for kids wuz gathering what t’day is known as ‘Recyclables’….we just gathered bottles for the two-cent deposit that had been paid (didn’t have aluminum cans in that stone-age period)…Ah well, seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same….

“Life obliges me t’do something, so I natter on.”  Justin Other Smith