I am what some would call a Renaissance Man, a Jack-of-All-Trades if you will, though I have fought that description for the majority of my life. Rather than accept my fate as a Renaissance Man, I instead tell people that I know how to do a lot of useless things largely because of my inability to focus.
I’ve learned to live with the Renaissance Man moniker over the years. Jack-of-All-Trades is O.K., but I’m not very “trade” savvy. I still can’t fix my car, I suck with power tools, I can do demolition in the home with reckless abandon but I can’t put it back together again, and I’m far more likely to use a couple bottles of Drano on a sink rather, risking rotting out the pipe with toxic poisons than unhook the pipe thingy on the bottom and clear the blockage manually.
My inability to focus has instead has led me to master, and I use this term very, very loosely, a wide range of talents that have little to no value in the regular workaday world.
That’s not entirely true. If I had pursued a career in the circus, then certainly my unicycle riding skill could have come in handy. As with most obscure talents I have, I learned to ride a unicycle from a book. My brother had left his old unicycle behind and I thought it would be fun one day to figure out how to ride it. As usual, my timing is off for such things. It was the dead of winter and had snowed the night before.
Undeterred, I went to the street out in front of our house, book in one hand, unicycle in the other, and started my lessons. I hung on for dear life to our fence that fronted the housienda and spent the next four or five hours alternately pedaling and falling along the fence. My hands were blood red by the time I was through. No, not from the falls, but the fence. Ever the penny pincher, my dad used a really cheap stain and my death grip leached it all into my skin. That and a dozen or so splinters were all I had to show for my day of unicycling. I was far from ever riding the thing.
Yet, I soldiered on. I would mount my one-wheeled steed each morning for the next week, through wind, rain, snow and gloom of night. Finally, I could ride a unicycle. I even learned how to turn. And then I was done. No need to learn how to idle in one place or go backwards. Knowing how to go forwards and turning was all I needed to say I could ride a unicycle.
Years would go by before I was able to use this skill again. By now I was 27. I hadn’t been on a unicycle in 12 years at least. But at the Pirate’s Week parade in Cayman, there was a group of young unicyclers. Me, I was a pirate and as we know, I am invincible when I am in my piratical gear.
I wandered over to the kids and marveled at the unicycle. I said I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to ride one. “Do you think I could try?” I asked. Soon I had a unicycle. Sure, I hadn’t ridden one in more than a decade. And I had never tried to ride one in the bucket boots pirates wore, or with a sword on my side.
I got onto the unicycle, balanced precariously, swung forward then lurched back with a lot of preconceived drama, then shot off down the road. As I made my turn about 50 feet down the road, I could see the little Caymanian kid’s faces. They were slack jawed, marveling at the goofy pirate guy who had never seen a unicycle close up who had flown off down the street on one wheel. I could understand their shock. They had obviously never met a Renaissance Man before.
I also learned how to juggle from a book. I wasn’t wealthy enough to afford real juggling balls. If you’ve never seen these, they are bean bags. They are soft and when they hit the ground, they don’t roll. Me? I improvised. I had taken up tennis a couple months earlier (another story entirely) and had a can of tennis balls in the house. It was a perfect substitute. There were three in the can and I needed three balls (we all know what has happened to my onboard set over the years so we won’t make any jokes here about this — at least right now).
Looking a bit stilted in the Bahamas.
After a couple weeks, I could juggle three balls consistently. A week later, three scarves, which is actually a lot harder than it seems. It’s an advanced skill. So is juggling four, five or even more balls, but that didn’t hold my interest. I had “mastered” juggling and if I still rode a unicycle, I could have either had a career with Ringling Brothers or a freak show here in Seattle.
I have other useless skills as well. I know how to walk on stilts, I can play the Flexatone (go ahead, look one up) and washtub, and can make it look like an arrow goes through your head. I know how to yo-yo, but not very well. I also made the city finals of the Frisbee Championships, but only because I was the only kid that showed up. And if you ever want a really amazing wooden hydroplane to tow behind your bike, I’m your man.
Sure, I could have spent all this time learning about that thing that makes my car run. You know, that noisy contraption under the hood. Or I could have learned how to install a new light fixture in that hole that is still in my ceiling these past 10 years. But who has time for that when you’re figuring out that throwing a lawn dart high into the air to the point that you can’t see it any longer is not a very good idea. By the way, neither is throwing rocks at bats.
But I can tell you that a Superball really can bounce high enough to go over your house, just like in the commercials. And I could prove it if I could ever find the ball.
In the Emerald City, capable of many things, but master of none,
– Robb