Muscle Memory

In the primordial days, when the fires of creation were still flickering, one summer I had three jobs. It was, I think, the summer after my second year in college, which means I was 19 or 20. I was enrolled in a news editing course at the UNC School of Journalism. (I count that as Job 1.) My dad had lined up for me a part-time feature-reporting internship, two mornings a week, at a small weekly newspaper. And I needed a job that actually paid money, as my summer earnings would be my pocket money for the coming academic year. 

 

I was fortunate that my work-study job covered room and board and that my parents paid for my tuition and books. But spending cash was on me. Given the constraints of the class and the internship, I needed a job with flexible hours. It doesn't work this way any more, but I remember walking into a Hardee's and asking for a job application. The person at the counter gave me a paper placemat with the application on the back. I filled it out, spoke to the manager, and started work the next day. 

 

I loathed it. It was mentally numbing, physically demanding, and often gross, and the manager was a letch and a creep. But it paid actual money. In fact, I got two raises over the course of the summer, was soon helping train new hires, and the management tried to get me to forgo returning to college in exchange for a supervisor's job. 

 

None of which has to do with muscle memory. That's the stuff that helps pianists and typists do their thing, A scene early in the movie The Competition, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving, shows Amy Irving's character on a plane, en route to a piano competition. On the tray table, her fingers play, and she hears the music in her head. Several times, it's her fingers that tell her a split second before her ear does that she's hit a wrong note. She digs out the music, checks it, finds the mistake, and goes back to practicing. Muscle memory is the reason that you really do never forget how to ride a bicycle.

 

So. Hardee's. That was maybe 35 years ago. 

 

This morning on my way to work, I decided on a small midweek treat and stopped at a local coffee drive-through for a cup of coffee and a pair of egg white bites (egg whites with spinach, poached by the sous-vide method). When I got out of the car, instinctively I folded the top of the bag over so that the logo side showed. 

 

No one else was around. I climbed the stairs to the office and reached my desk without anyone else seeing the bag. What difference did it make how I folded the bag, or if I folded it at all?

 

Muscle memory.

 

Thirty-five years ago -- I would often drive to work singing along with the radio to "Let's Hear it For the Boy" from Footloose or to Madonna's "Isla Bonita" or "Borderline" -- my supervisor at Hardee's instructed employees always to fold the bag so that the logo showed. That meant that as the customer carried the bag, everyone would see the company name. 

 

It's not only our brains that make habits and practices. The body does, too.  Which helps explain one reason I find so much appeal in what I call liturgical aerobics -- the "sit, stand, sit, kneel, stand, repeat" common to Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopalian worship services. 

 

I've had bad knees since I was 35 or so, thanks to a torn ligament, but when I worship in a church that invites people to kneel for prayer, something about the posture helps prepare me for the act that follows. I suspect that's part of the appeal of rosaries, meditation poses, and the posture of centering prayer. 

 

What holiness is stored in our hands, what knowledge in our knees? Prayer can, and should, and often does, occur at all times and in all places. When we incorporate muscle memory, though, on occasion you and I can transcend our current surroundings and discover the liminal.