Blue Yo-Yo

Oakland, 2000

It was puzzling to receive this yo-yo as one of eight Hanukkah gifts from R., my girlfriend during the end of the millennium.

As a kid I’d tried to learn a few fancy yo-yo tricks and failed. Like every skill that looks easy when an expert does it, mastering Brain Twister, Sleeper, and Rock the Baby proved far beyond the reach of my uncooperative wrist and impatient brain. Things might be different for kids today, when a web search for “best yo-yo tricks” calls up more than a million instructional videos.

When I asked why she’d given me a yo-yo, R. shrugged. Which made me retreat, instantly and unconsciously, into the most comfortable explanation: Sometimes a yo-yo is just a yo-yo.

And sometimes it isn’t. It took me about 15 years to figure out that the yo-yo was a metaphor, and a warning—for my level of affection toward R., for my emotional investment in our relationship, for my fluctuating libido when we were in bed together, or for all three.

Gaining expertise at anything takes a certain level of commitment, the sweet spot between its objective difficulty and our personal limitations. I never had much of a head for yo-yo tricks. But they seem easy, at least compared to some other skill sets I’ve abandoned learning, or continue to blunder through. Either way, I’ve never Rocked the Baby.