My knees are a pure physical manifestation of prayer. Prayers in need, prayers answered, prayers simple, and what are for many common prayers.

Which brings me in 2021 to my first of two total knee replacements. As my life-style has gradually been reduced to painful knees, I have been advised  by several  physicians that now is a good time to have them replaced. “Don’t wait too long, as recovery gets increasingly harder with age.” (This advice to me seems a little like the suggestion that one should get new tires in a classic auto. “Get ‘em now, while you can milk a few extra miles out of the old rust bucket.”)

But trick or not, rusty or not, the science of total knee replacement is a fascinating project to undertake in the new year. I’m seen sporting a cane. I’m doing isometric exercises opposite icing that surgically changed knee while also taking pain medication. I watch professional athletes who have injured or rehabilitated legs with entirely new compassion. I also watch dancers and runners with pure envy, vowing to join them soon.

Falling on your knees is part of everyone’s childhood, not just in prayer. I think of bandages on knees or skinned knees, as required is almost a definition of what it is to be young. Our knees were badges of courage, stupidity sometimes, and reminders that gravity never was forgiving. Not many thoughts of gravity even occurred to us when we were young.  Certainly as we grew older, sometimes God’s name was voiced in a tone devoid of all religion.

In retrospect, I have had my knees as a major part of my life all along. When I learned the arcane craft of stage-combat, along with the skill of being able to fall without padding, I learned to warm up the knees. A drill I’d learned from a British fight instructor called out: “a-rrrrrround, a-rrrround, arrrrround, push back,” to have us all swivel our knees in advance of doing a fall without injury to the ground. This worked for years as I passed on my training and trilling the “r’s” was part of the exercise.

I have had various cases of trick-knees in my more usual theatrical haunts. When working in the usual dark theatre, I’ve caught my foot under non-code runs of sound or light cables and gone down crashing on my knee. I dutifully called out, “I’m all right!” I got up and limped on in the dark rehearsal hall. After all the show must go on.

I remember now the time, when I found myself standing atop a platform being a sculptor’s model for young artists working on capturing the image of  my knee. In my memory, I remember myself willing to donate my scarred knee as subject.

Talk about the need of prayer? Not only have I long known the song, “oh break bread together on our knees,” recovering from surgery I suddenly remember another spiritual from my parent’s church; “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me oh Lord,  Standing in the need of prayer.” But these days, standing itself requires prayer.

— Special to the Telegram