Photo: Jovelle Tamayo/Washington Post.
When Rob is finished repairing an unwanted bike, he posts it on Buy Nothing and finds someone who needs it.
I learned something about the brain today that I never knew, something that made sense. It’s called “procedural memory.”
Maggie Penman writes at the Washington Post, “Rob P. sits in his garage scrubbing a broken shifter on an old bicycle. It’s his second hour scouring it, trying to free it from the gummed-up grease preventing it from changing gears.
“The shifter would cost about $10 to replace, but that’s not how Rob operates. If it takes him 10 hours to fix it, that is time well spent.
“Rob, who repairs virtually unfixable bicycles for free and gives them away in his community, is working to keep bikes out of landfills. But he’s also working on something else: feeling useful again, and figuring out what his brain is capable of after a catastrophic accident.
“Rob was hit by a car in a crosswalk in 2017 and spent three months in hospitals. He suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him partially blind and with lingering paralysis on the left side of his body. He didn’t remember some of his closest friends, his home or his city. He remains cognitively and physically impaired.
“A few years into his recovery, he was struggling with depression and needed to figure out how to put meaning back into his days. …
“Before he was hit by a car, Rob was a computer programmer for two decades. He does not remember what he used to do in that job, but his brain retained the skills he picked up in his teens and early 20s, when he worked in bike shops.
“ ‘He’s degreasing and de-rusting and hand-scrubbing spokes, completely taking things apart, reviving them and putting them back together,’ his wife, Becky, said.
“Rob believes he can offer something no one else can — repairing what a bike shop wouldn’t bother with because the cost of fixes would far exceed the value of the bicycle. …
“If you look closely at the two-wheelers he repairs, notes scribbled on blue tape are stuck to each seat. When he forgets whose bicycle he’s fixing, he looks to see a name and a date scrawled on the tape. When he doesn’t remember what the bike needs, there’s a piece of tape that says ‘flip fork’ or ‘fender.’ …
“When Rob woke up in a hospital in 2017 after being in a coma for a month … he didn’t remember what had happened, where he was or who the president was. But he recognized Becky.
“It took Rob nearly four years of rehab before he started to think about doing something beyond his recovery.
“He had always talked about starting a bike shop to offer free tune-ups to friends and neighbors but never had the time. So Becky suggested he try it. He started small in 2021, fixing bikes for his niece and her classmates to help them raise money for their school. The work felt familiar, if slow, and he relished the sense of accomplishment. He wanted to try more.
“He turned to Seattle’s Buy Nothing group — an online platform where people offer free stuff they don’t need anymore. He found bikes rusting all over the city, a treasure trove of bent frames and broken chains that were like puzzles waiting for him to solve. …
“When Rob is finished with a donated bike, he posts it on Buy Nothing and finds someone who needs it. Then he takes a picture of the new owner with the bike and sends it to the person who donated it.
“ ‘I say, “Look how happy you made this person because you donated this bike.” ‘ Rob said. …
“Eric Spier, a physician and medical director of the Brain Injury Program at Craig Hospital in Colorado, said fixing bikes involves ‘procedural memory,’ which makes it less vulnerable to injury.
“ ‘I’d have no idea where the letters are on a keyboard, but as soon as I put my hands on the keyboard I can type,’ Spier said. ‘That’s fixing a bicycle. Those things are deeply rooted in the brain.’ ”
Cool. I thought about that and how in a “senior moment,” I find it helpful to remind myself where I am in my activities, my procedures, you could say. Do you have tricks to shake you out of that moment of “drawing a blank”?
More at the Post, here.
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