Memories...

For the past couple of days, I've been playing a Swedish piano piece called "Sommarsång" by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger. I once had to memorize this piece over one of my summer vacations.

When I first picked it up yesterday, I started out by reading the music and got a little frustrated that I wasn't able to play it very well. The piece has a lot of jumps and fast scales so a lot of attention must be paid to fingering. After a while, I decided to stop looking at the music and just go by memory. Aha! It was one of those procedural memory moments. The memory of how to play that piece was in my fingers - not my in eyes translating notes to my brain to pass on to my fingers.

Made me think of the movie "The Pianist." It is such an incredible scene when Wladyslaw Szpilman finds the piano at the end and just starts playing like he never stopped... Hopefully, I didn't just ruin that for someone who has this movie on their "Must See" list. Anyway, if you haven't seen it, it is amazing!

Procedural memory is also the mechanism which allows me to ride a bicycle every time I go home to Sweden. I once went probably six years without riding a bike. Nuts!

I used to be the Queen of hands-free bike riding. Once, I risked my life (by passing through an intersection without stopping) to ride hands-free all the way home from school. It was an amazing feat!

I'm looking into buying a bike so I can go riding with Rebecka. I've said for two weekends in a row that I would go out looking for one. Maybe this coming weekend will be it. I'm just paranoid about buying expensive stuff without conducting proper research. And I don't really have time to do the research. So I'll just have to trust whoever is selling it to me (probably a really bad idea) and go with the flow.

Now I am being summoned for TV watching. Sounds important. Chao!