Knees are the alarm clock that tells you when you are a septuagenarian, and it must work best for residents of the city. We walk more than our countrymen, because we don’t own cars (too expensive to garage) and the city is so dense we don’t need them anyway (what is 15 minutes and three miles away down the hill in the country, here is around the corner). What we walk on is not the bosom of earth but concrete and asphalt, surfaces from which the shocks of every stride go straight up the tibia to the knee joint, where they settle until they form a colony, an outpost, a guerrilla haven of pain. It notifies me every time I squat down to retrieve a paper clip or pull a plug from a wall socket and realize, as I strain back to vertical, that the way up is most definitely not the same as the way down. My wife is a harder case. Her steps, like her judgments, are more decided than mine, so every two years or so she must submit to the ministrations of a physical therapist — a Tibetan, judging by his surname and the picture of him with the Dalai Lama that sits on his side table — who grips and scrunches the hard nodules where there should be smooth muscles and tendons, with the goal of breaking up the scar tissue until her next pit stop.
Gardeners kneel. In a flat garden with raised beds it is a simple action, made trying only by repetition. Harvesting a meal’s worth of lettuce is easy; poking holes and putting in seeds for a season’s crop of beans is not. In soil that is unkempt and uneven, everything becomes knee ballet: finding the plant to snip or the spot to put a new one, positioning yourself between stones and the plants you mean not to disturb, staying in place long enough to work the clippers or the trowel, then lifting yourself up without spreading destruction like a garden Godzilla. Your feet sometimes feel bad afterwards, if you have tucked your toes under your forelegs; your knees, always.
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