The Shank

We left dinner cold on our plates to meet the shank of day. As we climbed the hill—my children and I—we stopped near the pond, just on that edge between slope and perch, the willow branches all fiery and orange and long for the day, and I wanted my children to put their ears to the ground, to hear the earth swallow, to listen to the night and the hum of a million tiny organisms working to grow the trees, but instead, by the pond in the twilight of a March day, we listened to the frogs. A hundred or more groans and belches and tones. We listened because we couldn’t listen to anything else, the frogs having interrupted our original occasion for setting out. We listened because I wanted my children to hear the row of a day’s end, of nightfall, of what makes our place sound out and brush the sky with song. My son swung a branch against the dry grass, which now, under a prolonged length of day, pushed up new green. My daughter shushed him, as I did too, and put her head to my shoulder and smiled at the ensemble. “Do you hear,” I said to her. “Do you hear,” as if she could not, as if her experience would be different, both of us so fully aware of the cacophony of voices around us, the oasis of octaves—alert, alive, and rupturing the air.

My father always said the shanks of day were best—that time just before dark when the horizon softens into a tinge of color, when the day unwinds and work has been left behind, when a drink could be poured and sipped with polite conversation. Funny to think a shank is like a shaft or stem of nail, spoon, key, anchor, fishing hook even, or the port-braised shank of a lamb. But I think the longer stretch of shadows is a better fit—the remainder, the last of something, what is almost gone, the lingering light, the gap between what was and what will be.

It isn’t the only time I have celebrated the dusk. Years ago, pulling on smoke while playing songs on a dark porch, the fried odor of souvlaki simmering in from the Greek restaurant next door and the rattling hum of the bouzouki haranguing through the open windows, I watched the day go. I could hear the cafe’s owner, Vasili, dancing on the wood tables and a chant of “Opa!” as the wine glasses clanked from table to table, retsina spilling across the peeling plastic floor. This happened at least once before nine, before close, before the tired cooks turned off stoves and untied aprons.

I continued to strum on my old guitar until my Moroccan neighbor pulled into the driveway next door, his four children descending on him as he climbed from his silver Cadillac, his arms loaded with bags of groceries, soda and candy, a mix of chaotic voices jumbling under the new stars, even his dog and cat appearing from the yard. Within minutes, I’d hear the drumming commence, the beating of one man’s hands, the rhythm of the coming night.

And then, from the smoky blur of the now-gone day, I made out the wings of a pigeon picking bits of sloppy discarded meat on the concrete across the way, the glow of the McDonald’s fluorescent lamps illuminating the bird, the grunge, the trash cans, and the passing cars making their way where—to the shore, to the roar of the ocean just nearby, over that way, by the stony cliffs of a college town doomed to someday fall into the sea.

Yes, everything is so active toward the shank—a true buzzing of enterprise and experience. The day disappears into shadows like little cloaks sheltering the suggestion of night. And at the rise of morning, I wait for it. The shank pulls me to it, beckons me to go outside, to engage with the hems and bulk of my home, to listen and to know, and more, to...