The Acrobat

3 on Thursday

Songs, stories, and things worth noticing. Every Thursday.

Thursday, September 17, 2026 · 5 min read

1. THE STORY

I’m about eight or nine one winter when a team of Asian acrobats performs in my small town in northern Minnesota. The event is hosted in the basketball gymnasium. I sit with my parents and three sisters in the upper bleachers. The acrobats do flips and twirls and ride bicycles with several people hanging on. They make a human tower that touches the ceiling.

But what I will remember most is a man balancing on a unicycle.

He throws a rubber baseball into the crowd, motioning for someone to throw it back. His arms are spread wide and he waves his fingers, taunting the crowd. The ball comes flying back and the acrobat catches it with his mouth using a toothpick-looking contraption.

Everyone cheers.

He pedals to the right side of the gymnasium, throwing the ball into a sea of hands. A high schooler on the baseball team unleashes a fastball that looks as though it will behead the entertainer, but he again spears it with his toothpick and the crowd roars. The acrobat pedals his unicycle around the basketball court, tempting the next contestant. Hands in the crowd wave: ME-ME-ME.

I should mention here that winters are long in northern Minnesota. You can go months without seeing your neighbor. When you do, their face is covered with a scarf or snowmobile helmet. The cold, the isolation, the loneliness can be unbearable at times. To put everyone inside a gymnasium on a Saturday evening to throw a rubber baseball at an Asian acrobat tends to warm things up. It makes you feel like you’re part of the tribe again.

The rubber baseball flies from the acrobat’s arm and I watch as it deflects off hands and bodies and bleacher seats like a pinball machine until finally landing in my father’s palm. But my father does not wind up and throw the ball at the acrobat. He does not summon his Thursday Night League skills to show everyone how it’s done in northern Minnesota. Instead, in a great and selfless act of parenthood, my father hands the rubber baseball to me.

The crowd cheers, this time louder than ever before.

I’m going to pause here to tell you something: I have a tendency to overthink things. It has served me well as an observer in life and a songwriter. But as a regular participant in the world it has caused a lot of self-inflicted awkward pain.

I grip the rubber baseball and stare down the smiling acrobat balancing on his unicycle. But this is when a terrible realization occurs: I do not fully understand the game. Is it that the acrobat can catch the ball no matter the speed? Or is the trick that wherever the ball is thrown, he can catch it? I am not sure, and it’s a nuance I don’t have time to clarify.

It’s strange being a kid with your entire town cheering you on, waiting for you to throw a rubber baseball at an acrobat on a unicycle. I do not want to disappoint them. I want to win the game for us.

In a coin-toss moment, I decide to win the day by throwing the ball thirty feet to his right.

I know immediately this is not the correct answer because the acrobat does not even attempt to catch it. Rather, he throws his hands up in the air. The crowd moans and many laugh as the ball hits the gymnasium floor and rolls to the back corner.

The show goes on and everyone with it. Everyone except me, who preserves the past twenty to twenty-five seconds in a jar of vivid memory, like a frog in formaldehyde in science class. It’s on a shelf, which I can take down and set on a desk to examine for the next several decades whenever I choose.

And when I do, I ask things like: Why didn’t my father just throw the ball himself? Why did I think the acrobat had any chance of catching my throw? I guess I didn’t think he did. Wasn’t that the point? No, I wasn’t sure. I was just a kid, nervous. Everyone was watching me. I hate when people look at me. I get so confused.

And it’s easy now, as a middle-aged man, to be generous with that kid, forgiving. You were just a kid, I say to him.

But there’s a part of him that talks back to me, even now, saying, Yeah, but I was just thinking how cool it would be if everyone loved me so much after I threw the ball, like they’d carry me on their shoulders out of the gymnasium and into the snow. The cold, not even feeling it anymore.

Love,
Aaron

---

2. LISTEN

All ten tracks from the upcoming album are still in the Listening Room. If you haven’t listened through yet—or want to revisit one—you can hear them here. Listen here →

3. NOTICE

Is there a time in your life—perhaps more than one—when life went on for everyone but you?

Email me and tell me.

---

Past 3 on Thursdays · Listening Room · Play Near You · Sponsor an Issue