My Father's Knees

I have my father’s knees. His cinder-block calves still dwarf mine to this day, his thighs lack the definition I’ve gained through years of playing sports, but the thick ligaments and round, heavy kneecaps in between are the same. We share a distinctively wide patella covered by a tough, wrinkly patch of hardened skin, as well as the same odd bulge where the lower end of the quadriceps interjects onto the inside part of the knee’s upper half. There are other similarities to be sure, but our knees, those God made carbon copies of one another.

***

My family celebrated my eighth birthday by taking a camping trip to Clear Lake, high in the Cascades. It was my first visit to this marvel of nature, where the water (supplied by melted snow-pack and purified by the lava rock from which the lake itself is carved) could yield a crystal-clear view of submerged tree trunks and fish eighty or a hundred feet down. The views of the mountains, the lake itself, and the lush, thick forest we were surrounded by were all marvelous, but my attentions throughout the trip were with a small manmade object my parents stashed underneath the small stack of firewood. I had been clearly instructed not to touch the hatchet, nor to use it to chop anything (especially my brother). On the final day of the trip, however, while my family was distracted with making preparations to leave, I snuck the hatchet out from under the woodpile and began to carefully hack at a gigantic stump just outside of my parents’ eye-line. Whack! I drove the hatchet down into the wood, watching it cleave a thick wedge out of the bark. Up again, arms outstretched above my head, then Whack! I pierced the stump again and again, using both hands, then one hand, perfecting my technique so that I could chop wood ambidextrously. A steady rhythm of muffled thuds crept away from me through the forest, my undeveloped arms not yet capable of delivering a loud, ringing death blow. I hacked away at the stump, circling it, pounding it again and again, until the hatchet came swinging down and there was no whack. I looked down from my intended target to find the hatchet’s blade slicing into my right knee, my arm stopping its course in slow motion. Too late I heeded my parents’ warning and dropped the weapon, neither screaming nor crying, but simply staring as the small, thick line began to ooze crimson. I had the presence of mind to put the hatchet back in its place and concoct a brilliantly foolish story about falling and cutting myself on a lava rock before approaching my parents, a river of blood now pouring down my calf. “Mom,” I said calmly, fighting back the pain and humiliation lurking in the back of my throat. “Mom, I think we need to go to the hospital.”

The nearest hospital was at home in Eugene, so my parents drove me there. I told the doctor in Urgent Care that I’d fallen, and he stitched up the one-inch laceration on the inside part of my knee after cleaning the wound and finding (believe it or not) not a single sign of lava rock. I wear the thick scar to this day, though its ghastly purplish hue has toned down some in the intervening years. The stupidity, the wound, the scar, those are mine; the knee is still my father’s.

***

One cloudy February afternoon, the soggy kind that Eugene is prone to, my baseball team was practicing squeeze bunts on the turf field we used during the winter months. The pitcher would lob a ball towards the plate, a coach would roll a ball out onto the field to simulate the bunt, and the runner on third would try to score successfully. As the catcher, it was my duty to tell the fielders if we had a viable chance of getting the runner out at home. The tall lanky freshman pitcher tossed in a pitch, my red-haired teammate Chase took off from third, playing the part of the runner, and the coach who stood beside me rolled a hard grounder down the third-base line. Chase came on like a steam engine, but his huffing and puffing was drowned out by my hoarse shouting, “Four! Four! Four!” The third baseman fielded the ball cleanly, expertly flipping it from glove to bare hand. His crisp throw sent the ball into the hard leather of my catcher’s mitt with a sharp Whack! I dropped onto my knees, barricading the precious plate as Chase recognized he’d been beat. His foot cranked up underneath him as he careened into a hard slide towards my left side in a last ditch effort to slip past. I locked out my knee, extending my leg to its full length, and caught his upturned cleats with my shin guard. My leg didn’t move, but my knee certainly did, wrenching over sideways and sending a signal of agony that was entirely unique in my experience. There was no momentary numbness, no presence of mind; I simply crumpled over backwards, my eyes welling with tears. Chase helped me to the trainer’s room where I was told that, though I hadn’t torn anything, I would certainly need to stay off of my left knee for at least a week.

During the next season I started to wear thick neoprene braces on both of my knees (the left’s was thicker) whenever I would play any sports. The braces slowed me down a little when I’d play racquetball with my best friend, though I still managed to beat him plenty of times. Baseball had developed my right arm into a powerful weapon, especially on the racquetball court, where I could out-hit him by a wide margin, even if I couldn’t outrun him. I remember once crashing my knee into one of the hard concrete walls at full speed while making a play on a hard hit ball. Whack! I cranked the forehand shot into the opposite corner just before meeting with the immovable object that was to stop my forward momentum. I fell to the ground and writhed around in pain until the burning daggers retreated and allowed the dull, ever-present throbbing to resume its duties. I wouldn’t stop playing though; the love of these games, and the camaraderie that came with them is mine; but my knees, those are still my father’s.

***

Sometimes when I would lay awake at night, I could here my dad’s heavy footfalls on the stairs just outside my room, the creaking of each step punctuated by a pop or crack like that of a dried twig snapping in your hands. He’d reach the top of the stairs and the pops would fade away as he passed by my door, moseying down the hallway to bed. One day, after years of hearing these familiar sounds, I was caught off guard when, while climbing to the second floor of my high school in a deserted stairwell, I recognized the echoing sound of twigs snapping. I paused, then shifted my weight onto the next step. Though no sound came, I felt my knee creak like an old rocking chair sitting on top of worn floorboards. I took the next step, my left leg creaking this time, the feeling building in my mind until it burst forth as a sharp crack that rang off the stairwell’s concrete walls. I stepped again, and again, until I’d reached the next floor, the cacophony of pops still ringing in my head. I couldn’t help but laugh to myself: my dad, the professor, had skipped out on PE because he didn’t like sports, learned the game of baseball from a book for his sons’ sakes, and has knees that crackle like a bag of popcorn. Believe it or not, I have my father’s knees.