“Look at your cool shadow!” Shana said, as our daughter teetered back and forth in the slanting afternoon sun.

It was a cool shadow: a figure atop a single wheel, like one of those old typewriter erasers with a bristle brush on one end and a little rubber disk on the other.

“On second thought, don’t look!” I said, but it was too late. She looked, and in that moment of distraction, down she went.

It wasn’t much of a fall. We all laughed about it. I made a lame joke about Punxsatawney Phil and the hazards of seeing your shadow in winter.

True, it was winter, but we were taking advantage of a year-end reprieve from an unseasonably cold December. The afternoon was beautiful, nearly forty degrees and only an occasional southern breeze, a stark contrast from the fierce windstorm that had blown in a few days before, bending young trees to the ground.

We hadn’t exactly been housebound, but neither had we wanted to spend much time outside with wind-chills in the single digits.

Now, with the sun shining and the hedgerows rustling with foraging varmints, we were up on St. Peter’s Church Road, enacting a typical scene from family life: Mom and Dad teach Junior how to ride a bicycle.

Only in this case, Junior was our twelve-year-old, who mastered the bicycle about six years ago.

And the bicycle was no bicycle. It was a unicycle, a Christmas present that we’d assembled in the pole barn the day before.

Why a unicycle? Good question. It’s something we’d been wondering ourselves. As a gift, a unicycle has to rank up there with a set of bungee-jumping cables or a Howitzer.

I suppose I should have seen it coming. Our daughter has been fascinated with the circus for a few years now, an appetite whetted by weeks of circus camp in the summers. Circus camp teaches the fundamentals of clowning and big-tent showmanship, not to mention coordination skills like spinning plates, juggling, the Diablo (an hourglass-shaped, yo-yo-ish thing you manipulate with two sticks connected by a string), the rola-bola (a small balancing board that rolls on a short section of pipe), the high wire (not so high, in the case of young campers whose parents are potential litigants), and stilt-walking.

This may sound highly specialized, and a far cry from the simple pleasures of summer camps of yore, which imparted more traditional skills like, say, arrow retrieving, canoe swamping, the advanced application of Benadryl cream, and the art of the foul-mouthed bus ride.

Then again, everything these days is highly specialized – kids included. To her credit, she’s stuck with the circus, honing her skills to the point where she’s performed in public in exchange for the universal coin of the pre-teen realm: slices of pizza.

And the truth is, circus skills, which may seem somewhat disreputable on the surface, have developed her coordination, sense of humor, and, most important of all, her comfort in front of an audience.

Everybody gets butterflies in front of a crowd, but it’s good to know how to overcome them and get on with the show, whether it be speaking in a public forum, playing a concert, acting in a play, or perhaps something even harder and closer to home, like giving a wedding toast or a eulogy.

So I’m on board with the circus thing. Even so, the unicycle represents a new level of  craziness. Riding a unicycle is a skill that pretty much guarantees spectacular crashes. In that  way, it’s like surfing handrails on a skateboard. Is the one time you manage to make it down to the bottom without wiping out really worth the ten thousand wipe-outs it takes to get there?

Really?

Apparently, the wipe-outs are worth it to our daughter. And it’s our job as parents to help her reach her goals, however cracked they may seem.

Which is what brought Shana and me out onto the rough asphalt of St. Peter’s Church Road that afternoon, in the role of “moving walls.” Walls being very helpful to the beginner unicyclist, and walls that scurry along with the wobbling unicyclist being that much more helpful.

Of course, all bets are off if she happens to look down at her cool shadow.

But even then, moving walls can be useful for murmuring encouraging words and later, for making hot chocolate.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 06 January 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com