The Pip’s school was closed yesterday for contact-tracing of someone who had a positive Covid test, so he was home all day. It was the most awkward time of year for this, because the temperature was below freezing but there isn’t any snow yet, but I did force him to take a brief break from playing Super Smash Bros on the Switch and do something active. This included a brief period of playing catch with a baseball in the back yard.

While we were playing catch, I was struck by two things: first, The Pip is really good at baseball. I mean, I’m his dad, so I would say that, but he reliably catches the ball if it’s anywhere near him, and his throws to me are both fast and accurate. Especially considering that he only turned nine at the start of November. There were only 2-3 times that a throw really went wild on him– for the most part, they were right on target.

The second striking this was how little thought I had to put into throwing and catching a baseball. I just kind of… did it, automatically. I’m not saying I was painting the corners of the plate like Greg Maddux, or anything, but I could get the ball close enough to The Pip to be catchable on a variety of trajectories with only one or two attempts. And aside from those couple of wild throws, I caught pretty much everything he threw at me.

Here’s the thing: I’m not good at baseball. I played a bit back when I was a kid, but quit when I was not much older than The Pip is now. I could throw pretty hard, because I’m big, but was never a good fielder, and couldn’t hit worth a damn. I never even made it into the upper tier of Little League before I gave it up, and I didn’t even play beer-league softball in college or grad school. I don’t think I had a baseball glove on my hand more than maybe three times between, say, 1982 and 2016 (when SteelyKid took up softball).

And, you know, I’m not complaining. I’m competent enough that my fourth-grader thinks I know what I’m doing, and that’s all you really need as a parent. It’s just kind of amazing to think about how deep muscle memory goes. There’s a lot going on with throwing and catching a baseball, and it’s not something I do with any regularity, but having learned to do it forty-ish years ago is apparently enough.

This process of rediscovering skills that I haven’t used in three decades has happened to me a fair bit since the kids came along. I took SteelyKid ice skating a bunch of times a few years ago, and roller skating a few other times. I also had gaps of twenty-odd years between times going cross-country and downhill skiing, both of which I last did in college before taking them up again 2-3 years ago. Downhill was particularly terrifying to resume, because the local downhill ski area doesn’t have a big middle ground between the too-small kiddie rope tow and the awfully steep start of the trails at the top of the lift. It came back very fast, though I was very glad we signed the kids up for lessons because I couldn’t begin to explain to them what it is that I do to turn.

Riding a bike is, of course, the canonical example of a thing that you never forget once you’ve learned it. The gap there was a bit smaller for me, because I got a bike in 2003 when we moved to our house in Niskayuna so I could ride to work when the weather was nice. (This has come in really handy during the pandemic, because it’s good socially distant exercise…) That gap was probably 1985-2003, give or take a bit on the start. But again, after a couple really wobbly laps around the parking lot of the bike store, it came back, and I don’t need to really think about how it all works.

The downhill skiing and biking examples are, in some ways, the more consequential versions of this, because in both of those cases I’m just good enough at the muscle-memory task to be able to put myself in moderately significant danger. More than once I’ve thought, particularly while trying to keep up with SteelyKid on the slopes, “Boy, if I wipe out at this speed, it’s really going to suck…” But, then, that’s part of the fun of downhill skiing… It’s also what makes biking so much more enjoyable than jogging– there’s that little added element of danger if I should happen to bite it moving at 15mph on the bike that’s not there if I’m just plodding through the neighborhood on foot.

Anyway, I probably could (and in some sense ought to) spin this out into a bigger science-y post about all the physics involved in throwing a baseball, tracking the ball in flight, balancing a bike, turning on skis, etc. But that would be more work than I feel like doing; I just wanted to marvel briefly at how amazing it is that we can do all these physical things without really needing to think about what’s involved in any of them. Even if we haven’t done them in literally years, and were never really good at them in the first place.