I slid into night air. I wandered clear to the end of half-lit planking. Shielded from valet parking by ramshackle wooden lath, I whipped mine out and took a leak into the black canal. Wild-creature sounds so near the restaurant seemed both a relief and contradiction. Through the open door, behind me, I could still hear the knife-to-plate clatter, and there was Mother laughing with a hoot.

Here at dock’s end rested an an antique aluminum beach chair, frayed green-white woven strips. So many cigarettes had been smoked here, the woodgrain reeked. One nicotine-addicted waiter at a time must slouch here during wealthy older people’s salad courses. Some kid inhaling, thinking his own horny and ambitious thoughts.

Tobacco smelled evocative for once, almost healthful. It made Clyde seem alive and quite nearby. Back at the dim table, he’d presided as a force invisible. But out here, as I reeled in and zipped up, I swear I could feel him press. Knobbed kneecaps just at the back joints of my legs. Some memory of “driving” in his lap. Thanks to peripheral vision, some animal sense of what’s where, I knew that Clyde himself was standing just in back of me.

All my life I had been learning, scrounging, preparing one phrase. I’d wanted to instruct my savior dad: how to meet his Saviour in His native tongue. Clyde should offer the greeting in Aramaic Hebrew, a “middle” or “Rabbinic” form. Dad’s must be the very accent spoken by a dusty wandering Nazarene, Himself something of a Bible-route traveling salesman. His people had used weak gutturals, a certain singsong quite easy to imitate in other parts of the empire. It felt so right to me that Jesus’ twang should’ve been considered—a hick’s.

I’d known these words, first phonetically and then for real—by heart—nearly forty years. I’d carried them around, awaiting the one big ear to whisper into. Practicing, I’d muttered them to walls, by heart, to trees, to shopwindows but never once felt heard. I always told myself I’d know the truest chance for transfer when I finally met it.

Far across this dark swift-moving channel, that heron kept crying, waiting, repeating—soliciting the last of its kind to offer some romantic mirroring response. No answer. Only the one large bird sang, paused, then cried again into the dark. As I—methodical, depending on the rickety chair, half conscious that my family must be wondering where I’d gone—as I eased down onto my knees here at the pier’s murky end. Planking still felt warm from the day’s heat. I expected boards to be all splintery; instead I knelt on suede.

“It’s this,” I whispered.

“‘Anoki aleka’ is how He would’ve said it.
‘I belong to you, Lord, sir.’”