An Eggcentric Juggling Tale

Eons ago when I was too young and naive to know very much, my desperately lonely plain-looking mother met a charming man at a local bible study group. A seemingly innocent group that met in a members small house. Full of good but spiritually empty folks looking for life's answers in the worn pages of a very old book. Perhaps with a God to lead them to personal redemption, or at least find some deeper meaning in their existence. Or perhaps even real love, which might be the same thing as heaven far as most people are concerned.

My mother attended often, looking for any and all of those things above. However, she never seemed particularly "good" to me. I’m not sure looking-back today if she was purposefully evil, devoid of goodness (neutral perhaps), or merely just monstrously selfish. She certainly had some good moments, but few and far between sadly.

Pretty much her whole life was about her, and what she wanted and liked, and her own the family members were often hurt or offended by her various ways. Her parents, her sisters, and I her only young son usually bore the brunt of her selfishness, and she never cared, not...one...iota.

When I was punished, it invariably harsh, and often ended in various forms of overkill, even for honest mistakes or simple accidents. The pains of my young body was subject to her whims during random spouts of anger; But I had my interesting ways of evening things out however.

For some strange reason, I had developed a keen interest in juggling. I found it fascinating, the coordination and timing needed to perform an almost magical moving show in the air. To me, it seemed an amazingly wondrous ability. Doubly so since I was one of the most clumsy and awkward boys in America, at least at that point.

Hand something to me, its almost guaranteed to get dropped. Put me in a fancy room at your own risk-somethings' gonna get knocked over. It was just my way I suppose.

I had never ridden a bicycle, not once. I’d never tried skateboarding, couldn’t roller-skate, and tripped my way across every surface in existence. I don't think it’s even possible for boys to be clumsier than I was then. If it was fragile, don’t put it in my buttery fingers. If it required balance, it would indubitably fall, it’s as simple as that. So for me, jugglers represented the ultimate in elegance, balance, and skill, exactly the opposite of me.

I was beyond merely interested, I was enthralled.

If nothing else, I would master this skill, whatever the cost, and consequences be damned!

Watching jugglers perform carefully on our old black and white television screen, I'd try to copy their movements. Sometimes in downtown Buffalo, I would see street-performers juggling in person. Always being amazed and thrilled, their movements were as fluid and seemed magic, but I was learning as well. The motions, the movements, rhythms, and coordination. I was mesmerized but stoically absorbing it all live a tiny human sponge.

One time, I asked a juggler in person how I would go about starting. What were the first steps? He informed me this could be learned, with the appropriate dedication of course, and taking baby steps, as with many talents in life.

He mentioned starting with one ball, then two, as time went on. Start with balls, learn the objects, their feel, the timing of their flight, and the arcs of their descent, and go from there. So I went straight home, fully-inspired, and sadly failed in the most spectacular way for my very first attempt.

Searching our whole house for tennis-balls, golf-balls, or something akin to them to practice with, I found nothing. Hell, even balls of yarn would have sufficed at the time. Alas, my mother didn't knit, and so we had nothing even close to this.

I didn’t play with balls of any type usually, and my mother had nothing appropriate. I gave up and after attempting this with salt shakers and such. Such objects would flip, so that didn't work at all. Finally I went to the fridge for a snack, I was kinda peckish after my extensive search.

Then I spotted the eggs on the door shelf. They weren’t perfectly round of course, but they were close enough right? They seemed to be exactly what I needed, lightweight, small and almost round. So a very bad idea in the history of bad ideas entered my young but eager mind.

Why not eggs? They seemed fairly close to what I was looking for. Small, manageable, cheap, and seemingly abundantly available on the shelf. They might actually work for tossing into the air and practice for my juggling practice.

What’s the worst that could happen right? My bedroom had a rug, which made it undoable, just in case; But the kitchen floor was bright yellow linoleum which is cheap, smooth, and very moppable. Seemed like such a reasonable and doable idea at the time. My mother wasn’t home right then, and probably wouldn’t be for a while, so what better time than now to practice a future useful skill ehh?

So at first, I got out one small egg, and shuffling it back and forth in the air from hand to hand was fairly successful. I had the arc right, slow and steady, right to left, left to right, and the timing was down. Then after 10 minutes of this, I decided to upgrade, and another egg was added to the mix. Right to left- left to right, and overlapping arcs were the key, kinda like creating a Mcdonald's M, in the air. No problemo. I kept doing it, getting the timing correct for now, back and forth, with my poorly fragile eggs. Seemed easy enough, at first.

The eggs flew in front of my eyes, steady, not too fast, and simple. So, I decided I would add a third, confident in my ability to handle two, maybe I could somehow do three carefully and slowly. Being eager to try, I was sure I could somehow manage it. It was my final most fully absurd mistake.

Turns out I knew the arcs of two objects, but adding a third was an altogether different animal. I started throwing the first two eggs, and as soon as I added a third one, I lost all knowledge of what to actually do with this third thing and lost control one after the other. I saved one single egg, but the other two splattered on the yellow linoleum floor, to messy yellow effect. I placed the saved egg back in the fridge and looked at the liquidy mess that I'd dropped into the world.. I knew my mother might be home any minute, so I collected every sad shard of eggshell.

We didn’t have paper towels in the house, but I noticed the linoleum was very shiny under the liquid of the egg. So I reasoned, why not spread the glory?

I mopped the two eggs over the whole kitchen floor, it looked very shiny and magnificent. The floor reflected the light in a way it had never done before. No water, just eggs, spread thinly and beautifully. A true thing of beauty. Of course, I mopped carefully since I didn’t want to blemish my work with something so crude as a footprint, that would have been pointless. I wanted the kitchen floor to shine, and it did. It shined like never before. Until my mother finally came up the stairs. We were living in an apartment on Sherwood street at the time, on the west side, as per normal. She came up the stairs, opened the front door, on the carpeted living room, put down her wheeled shopping cart, and the first thing she noticed was the shine of the kitchen floor of course.

I heard her sigh of pleasure, and her compliment as she said aloud “Oh Johnny, you mopped the floor, it looks beautiful”. That’s the first statement I heard. Then I watched her take one step unto the shiny floor, then her massive leg slid all the way forward, and she hit the ground like a massive earthquake, As long as I’ve known my mother she was never a small or petite woman, she was pretty much massive, so when she fell, the entire house shook in protest. One would think that a moon hit the very Earth, and the End was here!

She fell hard, the house shook, and all Hell broke loose in my world. I heard my name screamed, “JOHNNY!” louder than I ever heard it before. She struggled, got halfway up, and fell again. The floor was slipperier than any ice rink ever designed, slicker than oil, but a shining example of how nice a floor can look. She ended up crawling out of the kitchen to the relative stability of the living room rug and finally struggled to her feet, huffing, puffing, and saying my name the whole time. I knew I was doomed, fully. There would be a full painful payment due for this, I had no illusions about this.

It was an honest mistake, and I tried to correct it in my own fashion, but a futile gesture at best. It mattered not, the damage was done, and I would pay in spades, as I always did.

I confessed to what had happened, and she listened in motion only. As with many things, she never really heard me, because she never wanted to. At her heart, she was a selfish petty being, and only she and her own comfort mattered. I was merely a burden, and not important, as always. First, after yelling about it, she spread water and soap on the floor, cleaned up my well-intentioned mess, then grabbed an extension cord, and beat me into total submission. I cried for mercy, which never came. Death would have been less painful than what I went through, and hopefully a lot quicker. She beat me badly, but she also seemed to enjoy it.

Looking back, I believe it was part of her nature, whenever she inflicted pain on other beings, whether physical, spiritual, emotional, or mental, she seemed to relish it, like it was something she needed, to give herself some kind of meaning perhaps.

To emphasize her own very being, she lived, she existed, if only through the testament of others, mainly through the suffering she inflicted. As I can and will attest, to this very day. I paid that time, and at many other times as well. Either through extension cords, pieces of wood, knives, hard slaps, or even a baseball bat on an occasion or two, even an attempted murder once. She suffered in her life from poverty and bad choices, but she didn’t suffer alone, her only son joined her on this journey for a long time. I existed, but not happily, never happily.