The Mobius Joint

Ach, my knee is as big as a cantaloupe. We’re old adversaries. I picked up my puppet head on June 2^nd, 1984, at 7:05PM. Yup, summer was just starting. I spent the summer limping around until September, when I did it again. A few weeks later, I was getting an operation to fix all that had gone wrong down there. It turned out to be a bad injury for the day. I managed to whack my kneecap like a pro on the first try. Well, the second try, at least.

Now, by the time we’re pushing 40, most people have some out of warranty parts. This is mine. My knee has let slip a couple not-so-subtle clues over the years. It’s not the ache, it’s the humidity. Yup, I could tell when it was going to rain.

I can’t even count on my lumpy appendage for meteorological aid, anymore. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have shown up at my 20^th reunion soaking wet. I got caught in the rain. So, there I was, standing in front of my friends from 20 years ago, looking like a drowned hamster. Of course, my zipper dried out last, so I got to stand like a vagrant, making a point of drinking nothing but Diet Pepsi.

My injury happened 22 years ago. Longer than I’ve been out of high school. It seemed so catastrophic back than. It seems… It just IS, now. I’m used to having one tire with less air in it all the time. Going down stairs is harder than going up stairs. It doesn’t sound like it should work like that… but it does. A bad knee is the antithesis of logic. Sometimes I feel like the doctor installed a little dinosaur brain down there as a practical joke. It hurts when it has no reason to, and annoys me endlessly. My knee has held, though. I can think of at least a dozen times that I’ve stressed that wobbly goblin way past the point of 1984. I’m still within 10 degrees of vertical, and happy to be holding the line.