AT THE MOMENT

I find myself sitting at the newly "regifted" piano, headphones on, as everyone else is sleeping. It's like visiting the elementary school, years after graduation. The waves of sights, sounds and smells, preserved in the glass cases of forgotten memories, are pleasantly suffocating. I flip open the tattered blue binder, whose cover is decorated with stickers I once thought were cool. It dawns on me that all of my Grade 10 music was photocopied, the implications of copyright infringement not quite appreciated then. My fingers reach for the keys. Despite the fact that I've dabbled in jazz lessons, shown off familiar riffs to sell the occassional grand piano, and even accompanied a good friend for a singing contest, I find my fingers nervous, confronted with the task of playing songs they once mastered but have now mostly forgotten. Very gingerly and slowly, I go through each song. They're familiar enough that I know when I've played a wrong note, yet I cannot command my fingers to avoid hitting the incorrect keys. After slowly stumbling my way through each song, 45 minutes have passed. There's one song left and I deliberately left it to the end. Chopin. His' was the music that would make a kid pee his pants. Too many chords that spanned more than an octave (a constant challenge with my small Asian hands), too many embellishing 32nd notes, too many double sharps. Each song was a painful try out that, if you survived the gory affair, led you to some of the world's most beautiful music. Feeling no bladder urgencies, I position my fingers, scanning the myriad of black dots populating the page before me. These dots seem random, but in some way, they are a road map for my fingers, its journey will, hopefully, create a decent sounding Valse. I apologize ahead of time to Chopin for the butchering I am about to do.

My fingers putter at first, threatening to stall, but I press on. I grab the next bar, quietly celebrating my triumph over the first passage. Then something happens: my fingers remember! They start taking a life of their own, awaken from what amounts to be a 14 year slumber, when I was last in Chopin-performing shape. The sheet music is now just a point of reference, reminding me of when to move on to the next section. It was both a shocking and exhilirating experience all at once!

So, perhaps that's the hallmark of greatness. It is often measured by AT THE MOMENT: how breath taking the sight of a mountain top is AT THE MOMENT, how tantilizing a well prepared meal tastes AT THE MOMENT, how hearty the embrace by someone you care deeply about is AT THE MOMENT. But when the moment passes, so does our experience, along with the perception of that experience's greatness. We tend to be a forgetful creatures, needing tokens and trinkets and photos to remind us of that moment. However, something is truly great when no intentional reminding mechanism is needed; it's just remembered. Spontaneous re-experience!