On vacation: My left knee

My left knee.

My left knee was replaced yesterday by a new polyethylene and steel knee. Scroll halfway down on that link & look at Part 7 to see the elegant saw used to trim the bone, a miraculous improvement on the hammer and chisel my son-in-law tells me was used on his mother's knee.

In October 1989, I fell in the street on a banana peel. Despite the comic tradition, it was not humorous. The injury has been a source of constant pain and progressive debilitation, and an erosion of the many pleasures my knee and I had shared.

My knee and I have great memories. Together we cycled hundreds of miles in Nigeria and the Argolid.  We hiked Yorkshire and Cornwall, the Argolid, the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the Pyrenees.  We fenced.  We knelt to polish floors, to weed and plant bulbs in the garden, to track earrings under furniture.  We knelt in churches (we recommend the kneelers in St George, Venice). We explored most of the calli of Venice, the streets of Manhattan, great areas of Athens and London and Washington, Rimini and Ravenna and Otranto.  We bounced babies. We once engaged in self-defense. We climbed a lot of Greek mountains. We crawled under and behind a lot of furniture, through the tunnels of Nauplion, and in the Altamira Caves.  We want our life back.  I have promised my knee a trip to Greece, once we are recovered, where we fully intend to be leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop.  

Wish us well.