Notes from my Knapsack 8-12-21

Notes from my Knapsack 8-12-21

Jeff Gill

A night in Granville
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A few nights ago, I watched night fall over Granville.

To be fair, I've seen this happen many times: from my back patio or front porch, up on the Denison campus atop the hill, along Broadway during the street fair from the vantage point of a french fryer or on the rockers in front of the Avery-Downer House.

After all, the sun sets every day. Even indoors, we notice it, as the lamps go on and the windows dim and begin to reflect interior light more than daytime shining in.

And we have a lovely variety of places we can be in Our Fayre Village to see that happen. I fondly remember the bicentennial year and the long dinner table through town, the changing of the light and the move from meal to dessert to friends singing on nearby stages (hi, Mary Borgia!).

What made the recent experience I had somewhat unique was it was a weeknight, no particular events in train, just a Tuesday, but a special day in that old friends we'd not seen in person for years were passing through town on their way back to a distant city, Granville conveniently being about midway.

I made my way to Day y Noche, grabbed an outdoor table, explained to the server we might be a while (not knowing how right I was), a promising a tip to balance it out. My wife came along, then our friends within the half hour, and we had dinner, and talked. Let's just say all four of us do well in the talking department, and there was much to catch up with. Wine and margaritas and water with lemon kept us into second rounds, and our meal went from nearly too hot to shady with the sun passing north of the streetscape to the sky starting to purple up.

As will happen, after settling up and nearly closing the place, we jumped over to Whit's before they did the same, and with frozen custard in various forms in hand, we grabbed some public benches. Our conversation or conversations went on apace.

In the sky, the swifts in their irregular and swooping way, filled the dusk overhead and then slowly filtered out of the aerial display, replaced as they went to their elevated beds by bats getting up and out for the night. Both the wing profile and flight paths of bats are more jagged, certainly distinctive. Clearly by day our downtown attics and chimneys and Prospect heights older tree hollows have large numbers of sleeping bats, because there were mobs out as the stars began to come out.

Did I mention we talked? Of things past, and things to come, dreamed of and implausible, nearby and likely. The usual. But at a certain point, as the restaurants closed and the streetlights were all on, we realized the street was empty. All the cars were gone, save mine across the way. So we talked a while longer.

Just before midnight, we agreed it had to end else we turn into pumpkins, so they walked back to the inn, and I my spouse to her car. Then I strolled back down Broadway. No cars, empty even of traffic: I could have walked down the double stripe. It was as it usually is, beautiful, but in a new way to me. I got to my vehicle and interrupted the silence by starting up and driving home, but the next morning, the peace of that scene was and is still with me.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's closed a few joints in his day, but not recently. Tell him when you know it's time to go home at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.