The serious business of fun

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When my family and I took a long weekend trip to North Conway, New Hampshire, my kids’ favorite discovery was an old-fashioned general store called Zeb’s. They stocked up on penny candy and my older son, then 11, also picked up a Duncan yo-yo. It was the kind I recognized from my own childhood: red plastic, white logo on the side, packaging that’s impossible to open without a pair of industrial-grade scissors.

I expected his interest to last a day or two, long enough for the string to get irrevocably tangled or the whole thing lost to the backseat of the car. Instead, he was soon slinging a growing collection of yo-yos, breezing past old standbys like “walk the dog” and “around the world” to wow us with multi-step combination tricks he learned from watching YouTube tutorials.

With lightning speed, he’d take apart and restring a yo-yo to make it smoother or faster. I tried to keep up as he rattled off terms like “responsive” (a yo-yo that comes back to you with a tug), “unresponsive” (a yo-yo that stays in sleep mode, so you can perform tricks) and “bind” (a maneuver that brings an unresponsive yo-yo back to you when you want it). I learned that throwing doesn’t mean the yo-yo will fly across the room. There are professional yo-yoers, even world champions. Maybe you can guess where this is going.

Six months after our New Hampshire vacation, on a Saturday in April, my family found ourselves at the Northeast Regional YoYo Contest. We would have gone just to watch, but my son had something bigger in mind. Being in 6th grade isn’t a picnic for most kids, and he was still finding his way. He isn’t a sports kid or someone who craves the spotlight. Yet leading up to the event, he’d strung together and memorized a series of sequential trick combinations, all set to one minute of a techno beat. He’d decided to take this leap, all on his own, and we were excited – and a little nervous – to cheer him on.

Everywhere we looked there was a kid with a yo-yo. They gathered on either side of the stage: chatting, comparing notes, trading yo-yos and tricks; they never stopped, even as the day’s programming began and groups of competitors, all ages and abilities, took their one-minute turns. The three judges were former national champions. The MC introduced each kid who took the stage, their music queued up and ready to go. A teenager with warm, gregarious energy cheered and offered up high fives, and my son made friends with another boy his age who’d come from NYC. The energy was welcoming and inclusive. Socially, it was a yo-yo-fueled Utopia.

And suddenly, there he was on the stage: my son in his black t-shirt, gray pants and bright green Crocs. I have to admit, of all the places I expected to tear up over the course of a year, a yo-yo competition in Springfield, Massachusetts, was not on my list.

There are the places you expect to find joy, and there are the places where it finds you.

And being a mom of a sixth-grade boy? It’s full of surprises.

We stuck around to watch the pro finals, mesmerized as these young men, whose songs ranged from electric riffs to Taylor Swift, performed tricks I couldn’t pull off in my wildest dreams. It was some serious fun. My son got a new yo-yo autographed, and his little brother volunteered to learn a beginner trick on stage. We ended the day with cheeseburgers and milkshakes at Wahlburgers. It was the kind of day I never saw coming, a 10/10.

There’s so much about being a parent that catches me off guard, and as a writer, I once had a workshop leader who encouraged us to lean into what he called “weird and surprising details.” I love this, and I think of it often. It came back to me most recently while working with Talia Vestri on her essay about falling in love at — and with — gaming conventions, or “cons.”

She reminded me what it's like to step out of our everyday lives and into something special. And the older I get, the more I grab onto flashes of surprise and joy wherever I find them — or where they find me.

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