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I have known people who secret away small things from home to remind them of Canada when they're travelling. Shortwave radios for As It Happens ("Da, da, da-da-da. . ."), one last Crispy Crunch, a tattered Upper Canada Lager shirt, a recorder. Me? I used to take my yo-yo. I was never very good with it, knowing just five simple tricks, but all yo-yo tricks are flashy enough to allow one to take centre stage pretty much wherever one throws it around.
This was especially true for the travelling I did in the developing world over many years. How many yo-yos could there be in Honduras, for example? Well, probably just one: mine. It was a Professional, although I never did figure out what was professional about it other than that it was wooden rather than plastic. It was blue, and parts of it weren't even blue any more, having gone with me to Central America, Asia and then finally to the Middle East.
I recall one particularly hairy experiment inside a cramped minivan in Syria with nine people on their way from a wedding — the driver played a flute while I yo-yoed and he drove with his feet. I used an open window for an outside loop. And when I was working on an archeological dig in Jordan, I often took my yo-yo downtown in the evenings when friends and I would stroll the amphitheatre in Amman, licking ice cream cones and listening for the Holy Grail of Middle Eastern music (for us, anyway), Bahraini oud music. Tough to find, but beautiful, beautiful.
I would throw my blue Professional around and kids would gather and follow us, miming for the same tricks over and over again, amazed at the blue top that returned to its owner so mysteriously! Occasionally, the string would break and the blue Professional would shed some more colour as it pop-pop-popped away across the pavement. There would be a mad scramble of arms and legs as the kids would fire after it to bring it back for more tricks.
After one such evening, a friend and I retired to a small restaurant above a shoe store that overlooked the main plaza. We sat and ordered mint tea after mint tea. It was cool in the evenings then, and the tea brought us warmth and conversation.
I was playing idly with that darned yo-yo, rolling it in my hands and curling it up and down, when I noticed a lad of perhaps 8 across the nearly deserted room, following my hand movements with his entire head. I opened my hand palm up with the yo-yo on it, suspecting he had never seen one before. He looked like he was from the Sudan; there were many camel brokers in town at that time from the Sahel region.
His mother encouraged him to go and have a closer look at the foreigner's strange blue object. He was nervous and picked his way carefully among the scattered tables. On reaching me, he gingerly picked up the blue Professional and shyly looked me in the eye. "Think you," he said, and raced back to his mother with my old yo-yo. Oh well, I thought, there will be other trips, and I'm pretty sure The Bay back home has a few more on the shelf.
Special to The Globe and Mail
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