The Kendama Summer

My son is thirteen. In May, he came home from school with a kendama, a wooden Japanese toy shaped like a hammer with a ball on a string. The idea is to swing the ball up and catch it on one of the cups, or on the spike.

I grew up in Osaka playing kendama, but I hadn't touched one in thirty years. I picked it up to show him a trick, and to my surprise, my hands remembered everything. I did "airplane." I did "around the world." My son stared at me as if I'd grown wings.

"Dad. Teach me. Please."

So we practiced together every evening on the back steps. I taught him the tricks my grandfather taught me. He taught me new ones he'd learned from videos, with names like "lunar" and "earth turn." We clicked and clacked until the sun went down and the mosquitoes came out.

By the end of the summer, he was better than me. He's joined a club. I bought my own kendama, made from cherry wood. It sits on my desk at work. Sometimes I play with it during long phone calls.