KING OF THE MOUNTAIN

Remember playing games such as King of the Mountain? In our childhood, my brother Stu and I would have spent endless time on multiple days playing that fun pastime on the piles of dirt in the picture.

Last fall, while out for a walk in our neighborhood to awe at the changing of the leaves, I passed a large brick house undergoing monumental repairs. To be exact, it was a warm October 26th. The grounds looked so inviting that it brought out the child in me.

In an instant, I had a flashback to my childhood in Roselle, New Jersey, playing King of the Mountain (or Hill) with my brother Stu. Whenever the slightest accumulation of dirt collected on the street outside our four-family apartment house, one of us would climb right up and announce that we were King (or Queen) of the Hill.

Walking along and soaking in the warmth on that autumn day in town, thoughts kept gnawing at me, wondering how we knew to play King of the Mountain and why it was so entertaining. After all, I know that we didn’t invent the age-old game.

Possibly our two older brothers introduced Stu to the fun routine. Or maybe our father played it with his five siblings in their youth and then taught it to his children.

Were other neighborhood children or maybe classmates who attended our local Lincoln School playing it in our childhood? Did Stu get the idea from watching The Little Rascals, Dennis the Menace, or Leave it to Beaver on television or reading about it in books and following shenanigans, such as those Huck Finn portrayed? Was it trial and error? Or was it simply intuition?

Where do we learn things? Who was the first person to play King of the Mountain? Was it Moses?

Simply passing by a construction site on a seasonal walk unleashed a memory of tremendous joy generated from the cost-free games that we played as children. That is other than the scratches, cuts, and bruises we sustained. C’est la vie.