Learn (ideally, master) a completely impractical, useless skill. The more nonsensical and less practical it is or could possibly ever be, the better. Do it because you’ve always wanted to but thought it was silly. And get good at it. Get good enough that when you’re an adult and decide to break it out, people are like, “Holy shit! How the _____ did you do that?”
Like… how to tie a cherry-stem into a knot while it’s inside your mouth. Or how to play “jacks” and clear them all the way through “tensies.” Or… how to juggle.
Somewhere between the fall of 1983 – my freshman year at Pilgrim high school in Warwick, Rhode Island – and the summer of 1985, when I left Pilgrim at the end of my sophomore year, there was a guy named Larry Lerner* and, man, could he juggle. (*No names have been changed to protect anyone involved. And if you ever see this, Larry, thanks!) I don’t even remember much about how the guy looked. He was kinda lean and long, with dirty blonde hair. He didn’t play on any sports teams, at least not that I remember, or that I was on… and I played on 5 different ones in the two years I was there. Nope, Larry wasn’t a jock, and he didn’t hang around with any particular “group” that I can remember. Back in the early to mid-80’s, everyone got lumped into these various groups: you could be a nerd and hang out with kids who were academically successful, or you could hang out with the jocks (some of whom were also academically successful, but that wasn’t cool, so they took the mantle of ‘jock’ over ‘nerd’ any day of the week and twice on Sundays). You could be a stoner – and that doesn’t seem to need an explanation – which might even trump being a jock… I can think of at least two of those who were pretty good athletes who smoked weed and while they got some acclaim for being athletes, everyone knew them as ‘stoners.’ Anyway, you get the point.
I don’t remember Larry Lerner being a rocker, stoner, jock, nerd, or any of it. I just remember him as being a guy who did his own thing… And his thing was juggling.
He was at least a few years ahead of me and he was so good at juggling that he started a juggling club. I don’t remember if it lasted beyond Larry. Hell, I don’t remember going to more than one or two meetings of the Juggling Club. I just remember watching Larry Lerner with three tennis balls and thinking, “Holy crap! That is so ______ing cool. I want to be able to do that.“
First, there’s the standard three ball juggle. No big deal, you say? It is when it’s done by someone who’s mastered it. Larry could switch his hands so that he was grabbing the balls out of the air with his hands facing downward, toward the ground. Which meant he was really throwing from an inverted position each time – backhand – letting the ball that he had just ‘snatched’ out of the air arc out of his hand by opening it. I didn’t know how to do it at the time and it would take me countless hours to figure it out. (YouTube was a long ways off, kids, and so some of us had to learn shit the old fashioned way).
He could switch effortlessly between a ‘normal’ triangle juggling pattern to the ‘circle,’ where the ball is shifted from one hand to the other and two are always working their way up and down the circle. He could switch directions. Or stop on a dime and ‘juggle’ two balls in one hand and move the other up and down or toss it to match one of the two balls in his other hand. Steve Martin used to do this trick in one of his acts and it takes a moment for your eye to catch what’s being done, and it’s kinda funny because it’s not really juggling… but if you ever try it, you realize pretty quickly it’s no gimmick. That’s what’s great about it.
With some coaxing, Larry would break out the really good stuff for us. I had seen him walking down the hallway of the school one day, ‘juggling’ tennis balls by throwing them off of the ground… right in step while he walked. Right hand down at an angle he would toss the tennis ball, it would bounce up perfectly into his waiting left hand, which had just delivered a perfect bounce pass to his right hand, which had also just sent another tennis ball groundward toward his left hand, and on, and on…
He could do the same thing upward, off of the wall. One bounce off the wall, the green, fuzzy, bouncing orb would complete its arc and land perfectly in his left hand, which had already sent a picture perfect toss off of the wall to his waiting right. It was mesmerizing…
I didn’t have a can of tennis balls was the first problem. And asking my father to spring for a can seemed…excessive. At least in our house.
I started with three softballs. Thump. I would make the first throw – up to the imaginary right ‘corner’ of the ‘box’ that Larry told us to imagine. I’m still not sure it’s a great analogy, but it got me to thinking about the geometry of the whole endeavor and I could see what he was saying. Each throw had to intersect the ‘line’ of the prior ball from the other hand. Thump-thump. The softballs hit the ground again. It might have been fifteen minutes later, more or less, and my father came out of his room.
“What the fuck is going on out here?!” I froze in mid-throw. The softball arced and landed on the carpet. Thump.
“I- ahem, I’m learning how to juggle,” I said, trying to find my puberty-strained voice. He just stared at me, blinking. He was completely unprepared for that.
“Well…shit, can you do it quietly? I’m trying to take a nap.”
“Okay, Dad.” I had no idea how I was going to do it quietly. There was snow on the ground outside, so that was out. There was nowhere else in the house that wasn’t closer to his room.
“Thank you,” he said, the exasperation clear in his voice. He turned around and strode down the hallway to his room and the door shut.
I got the pillows off of my bed and placed them on the ground. With all the seriousness of a sound engineer, I tested how high I could drop the softball and the noise it would make. It wasn’t working. It was still too loud, but if they fell from close to the ground, it would work, but I wasn’t close enough to the ground…unless I kneeled!
I spent a lot of hours that weekend kneeling on the carpet in front of my fireplace, but by the end of that weekend, I could juggle. Not great, but I had the fundamental principle down. I could keep three balls in the air for 10 to 15 passes, sometimes more. Yes, the balls tended to wander out, farther and farther from my hands with each successive toss, but I knew I could correct that.
I had to make more precise throws with each hand. So I stopped juggling for a while and practiced my throws. Then I practiced with just two balls, trying to keep the two always in the air and moving. Of course, my left hand sucked. After a while I could keep the throws from edging out, but my left toss had a tendency to go forward from my right and eventually that would lead to balls everywhere. By spring, I made a few trips by the tennis courts after wrestling practice, when everyone else had already left the school, and managed to scrounge up three errant balls the tennis team, or some other locals had launched and never recovered. I was in business.
By the approaching summer of 1986 – the summer after my junior year – I was living in Queens. I had been attending school there after moving in with my mother and her husband, my new step-father. Our science teacher had encouraged the nerdiest of us to apply to these summer research programs, where we would intern with some professor and help him or her with their ongoing research and write a science paper for it. I wound up at the University of Georgia, interning in the Physics and Astronomy Department for the Chair, but that’s not what I remember most about it. What I remember was the night that one of my fellow students, a guy I hadn’t known too well, but who had always seemed to be in the crowd of “cool” kids, Scott Steinberg*, somehow broke out some tennis balls while we were hanging out in his room, along with his cousin Phil Katz*…and started juggling. (*Again, these are not made up names.)
By the end of that evening, with absolutely no intoxicants involved, Scott and I had figured out how to juggle six balls back and forth, first starting with three and working our way up, passing them back and forth and moving across the room until we were at opposite walls of his dorm room, crisply snapping throws back and forth. My right hand to his left, or across to his right, we kept changing the patterns and trying different combinations. Phil sat on his bed in the dorm room with a running commentary: “Holy shit! I can’t believe you guys are doing five! Can you go across to opposite sides?”
And so we would try. Could we do it on a bounce? Or after we got one way down, Scott would see if we could do a more challenging variation. I was just along for the ride, like a human JUGS machine, firing tennis balls back as quick as Scott could throw them my way. By the end of the night, some of the other kids in our crew had come by to watch. Linda Sirakis, a wonderful Greek girl who was like our den mother and tended to dampen some of our stupider ideas, would clap and cheer for us, all enthusiasm and support.
It was sublime. I’ve never juggled anywhere close to that level since.
Years – hell, decades – later, I’ve sometimes broken out that skill for recalcitrant kids and their exasperated parents. It never fails to stop a toddler in mid-tantrum. At least briefly. I can even juggle with strange-shaped objects, or differently weighted ones, as long as I can hold them in my palm and get a feel for the different weights and the timing of the throws. I can’t do pins because it requires additional timing practice for the flip to catch the handles, though I keep saying someday I’ll learn…
Yeah, all in all, it’s turned out to be an utterly impractical, completely worthless skill… I can’t think of any good use for it to benefit humanity, or save the whales, or make a political statement against (insert your un-favorite politician or cause) …And if I invented a time machine and could go back in time, I might fix a few mistakes – but I damn sure wouldn’t change learning to juggle.
So, if you’re a kid reading this, ignore your parents ragging your ass about that utterly inane thing you’re learning off of YouTube. Do it anyway. Do it for you. Do it especially for you, even if it’s something that will never benefit humanity or your family or anyone but you one jot or tittle.
And if you’re a parent or just an adult and this seems like terrible advice: let me just say that it’s not too late for you, either. Trust me, you’ll never regret it.