I got out my clarinet last night. Julia is in jazz camp in Kansas and staying with me, so I was trying to see whether I could play anything by ear. Sometimes my fingers knew how to play something and sometimes they didn't. They knew Body and Soul and In a Mellotone, for example but for some reason they didn't know Stella by Starlight. Holding the instrument in my hands I found that my memory for certain songs dissolved into thin air. Not only did I have no idea of how to make the fingers play, but I had no notion of the melody. These were songs I know pretty well, too, when I don't have the instrument in my hands.

It was an experience akin to groping for something in a box full of junk in the pitch dark.