Juggling

I'm not good at remembering when things happened in my life -- you know, just this minute it occurred to me to wonder: is my weakness when it comes to knowing even approximate dates of events in my own life related to my great fondness for learning and memorizing historical dates going back thousands of years? Is it nothing more than a clear-cut case of overcompensation? But that's not what I came here to talk about today.

I remember that I started juggling at age 8, in the 3rd grade. I started because I saw a stand-up comedian on TV who juggled while he made jokes, mostly jokes about juggling. I know it was the 3rd grade because shortly after I saw the juggler on TV, my 3rd-grade class had a circus, and my act was juggling 2 balls. 2 balls with both hands. At the time, even for an 8-year-old, juggling 2 balls felt sort of lame. Soon after that -- how soon? I really don't know -- I could juggle 3 balls, or 2 balls with one hand. This is a picture of someone else, not of me as a young child, but it kind of gives you a sense of it:

And that's pretty much as far as I've gotten with juggling in the last 50 years. Except that I can juggle 3 balls for a long time without stopping or dropping a ball. But that's not really a crowd-pleaser, because to appreciate it, someone would have to stay there and watch me closely for a long time, and frankly, most people have better things to do.

For most jugglers, the next step after learning to juggle 3 balls is to learn to juggle 5 balls. I've attempted 5 balls, but I've never really done it. That is to say, none of my attempts at juggling 5 balls has lasted long enough that I feel it would be honest to claim that I've juggled 5 balls at all. Same with juggling 3 clubs, another popular next step after learning to juggle 3 balls.

Maybe this is a character failing on my part. Maybe I should have tried and tried and tried until I could juggle 5 balls. Or maybe I correctly sensed that I had an ability to juggle 3 balls, and no ability to juggle 5.

In any case, where it might have been more usual to try to move from 3 balls to 5, I concentrated on juggling 3 balls for longer and longer periods of time without a pause or a drop. My personal record for continuously juggling three balls is 90 minutes. I did that in 1988 or 1989, I think. Could've been 1987. At the time, the world record was 3 hours, 14 minutes and some seconds. I was close enough to that record that I seriously thought about trying to set a new record. And it was just about at that time that the new annual Guinness Book of World Records came out, and someone had set a new world record: over 11 hours. And I didn't even want to try to compete with that.

So, that's a useless skill I have. Except that juggling 3 balls for a long time gives you an aerobic workout. 30 minutes juggling 3 balls is not entirely unlike 30 minutes on a treadmill.

As a small child, I read an article in Scientific American about juggling. The author said that lacrosse balls have a good size, weight and bounciness for juggling. I have found this to be true.