The baby hat (I love saying “for my grandson.” I’m going to be saying that so many times!) is something my hands can only do a few rows of at a time on those tiny needles.
But it was so hard to put down when I had to!
And so a stalled-out shawl project on 5 mms is off and running again, something far easier to do as my hands finish recovering from hauling luggage across airports and an arthritis flare. An hour Sunday, an hour and a half yesterday, two and a half today: making progress. You practice. You build the hand strength back up again.
And it got me thinking on an old thought. Of how, all those years I studied piano under Louise Kupelian (I remember how much she used to love a good bilingual French/English pun), I was learning how to translate symbols on a page into movements of my fingers–and how, having learned that first visual-to-motor language, how much easier it made it to learn to knit complicated things, reading the knitting-language symbols across the row while my hands played in time. And then eventually to compose my own.
When my visual memory was damaged by my lupus, charts were gone (I’ve long since made my peace with that) but those written-outs, closer to piano notations, they stayed.
About five more hours of work and I’ll be done with the knitting that the bear scowled at.
My folks had no idea how much more than piano they were giving me lessons for as they sent me off to Somerset.
(And this is so much not what I expected to blog about when I sat down to write. I wonder… And I wish my old teacher and her family all the best, wherever life has taken them by now.)
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Added Wednesday morning in response to Don’s comment: muscle memory is when I can sit down with a music book open at some piece I had not thought of in 30 years, start playing it by sightreading and then within a measure or two, my fingers are off and playing the thing exactly so, book free (as long as I don’t think about it too hard: the moment I start paying attention to what they’re doing, I need those written notes!)
This goes deeper–this goes to learning new stuff entirely in a new language for having learned the first foreign language well. Mrs. Kupelian used to say that if she never taught us anything else, she wanted us to learn to sightread. This, now this, now this, read read read. I left at high school graduation with a very large pile of books of different composers. (And the only thing the movers lost when we left New Hampshire in ’87… It pains me still.)
I remember reading a study once about stroke patients that said that those who learned a musical instrument in childhood recovered mobility far better than those who didn’t–and the more that instrument made you use the two hands and ten fingers independently of each other, the better. (The piano wins! Oh, sorry, Jim, no–the organ does!)