The century was drawing quietly to a close and I was in my earliest moments of real adulthood. The evening of December 21, 1999, I was sweeping my first apartment, a shoebox in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, after work, my first salary-and-benefits-type job. The next day was my birthday, my first out of college, twenty-two on the 22nd. The windows of the tall deco building opposite were bright with Christmas lights, and my old refrigerator was groaning its death rattle. The phone rang.

          Grandpa Rex is in the hospital, my dad said. This only barely rated as news—most recent memories of my grandfather involved hospital beds, and plenty of not-so-recent ones, too—but my father's voice had the tender, bruised quality it gets when things are heavy, telling me that, yes, this was a big deal. You might want to come see him, because you probably won't get another chance.

          My grandfather had gone to the hospital for some minor complaint and was waiting to be discharged when he'd had a massive heart attack. He wasn't expected to regain consciousness—this would be the last hospital. I didn't know what to do with myself, so I gripped the broom and went hard after the big dust motes under the radiator. No more Grandpa Rex, I kept repeating under my breath, as if the room cared. One of his paintings hung over my bed, a garish, green, carnivalesque canvas of a nude on a bicycle, the perspective nauseatingly distorted. It seemed to be mocking me. 

***

          My grandfather had lived in a stiflingly hot room choked with salvaged furniture and overgrown aloe plants, in a mostly Chinese building near the United States Mint on Duboce Street, right where the streetcar comes above ground. The apartment made me think of a line at the end of Gregory Corso's poem "Marriage," where the narrator imagines himself old and unloved—"all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear, and everyone else is married." It was only a twenty-minute walk from my new starter studio, but I hadn't seen him in a month.

          That last time, I'd brought him a new phone, because his had stopped working. He was as lucid as ever and in decent humor, though typically weary—the steady accretion of ailments and traumas over the previous half-decade had left him constantly exhausted, even when nothing was specifically wrong at the moment. He offered me a beer and we talked about Law and Order and Bill Clinton, him at the little table strewn with remnants of prepackaged meals and pill bottles and bags of pistachios and old newspapers, me on the creaky twin bed with the plaid blanket where he slept twelve to sixteen hours a night. These were the only places in the apartment to sit. 

          Around us were paintings he'd made late in life, many inspired by Chinese calligraphy. Throughout his career, written language had been a recurring subject in his work—he admired both Kenneth Patchen and Jasper Johns—and after returning to San Francisco from New York in the early eighties, he'd turned from the Roman alphabet to Chinese. My dad thinks the shift had been coming since the early sixties, when my grandfather often drank at the original Cedar Tavern in the Village with the abstract expressionist painter Franz Kline, whose own work was often compared to logographic writing systems. But my grandfather's interest in Chinese went beyond his art; he'd moved into the building after befriending a thirty-something student and au pair named Mao-Pei, who was trying to get a green card and offered to teach him the language in exchange for help with English. She got further than he did, but the apartment was still filled with artifacts of his obsession, down to the Chinese clock over the doorway that I sneaked glances at while wilting in the heat of the room.

          My grandfather wore his usual uniform—wrinkled primary-colored turtleneck and loose high-water jeans that showed plenty of bright sock above black Reeboks. The garments did little to hide a painfully thin and bony frame. But his face, framed by the stick-out ears and wispy halo of white-gray hair, was as animated as ever, and his eyes crinkled with amusement and generosity as he followed my ramshackle sentences about my new apartment and new job and new aspirations. He gave the impression, as he often did, that he knew all about the experiences I was describing, but still found them as thrillingly new in my telling as when he'd gone through them himself. 

***

          That look of lively engagement was only a memory now. The first thing I noticed about the man lying between the high metal rails of the hospital bed was how laughably incongruous the vigorous gray brush of his mustache had become. It no longer had anything to do with a face that was now virtually unlined, the skin as smooth and untroubled as a baby's. My grandfather looked beautiful, and utterly remote.

          Classical music played at a respectful volume in the room, masking the efficient hum of the hospital as it kicked into its night shift. The place was the UCSF Medical Center, a sprawling complex on a hill near Golden Gate Park that was my grandfather's home away from home. Over the years, I'd visited him there during incarcerations for bouts of pneumonia, a cataract operation, hip replacement surgery, the never-ending kidney dialysis, a quadruple bypass, and so on. Modern medical science, I'd often thought, is a blessing and a curse. It was there that I'd fought to keep his wheelchair from careening down a steep slope while taking him to get his teeth fixed at the dental school, and there that he'd admonished me "not to get anyone pregnant" one summer night when I stopped in to tell him about a girl I thought I might be in love with. 

          But this room, which the attendants called a "hospice," wasn't like the others. He had a million-dollar view of the city, and, for the first time, no roommate. And there were almost no machines—just an IV drip and an EKG. 

          I stood near the bed with my father and my two youngest brothers, Nathaniel and Philip, in town for the holidays. I don't remember what we said, only the strangeness of saying things to this mute, unresponsive body, which rationally I knew belonged to the mild, rumpled 81-year-old painter I'd called Grandpa Rex my whole life, but which seemed like nothing more than a symbol, a cipher. A few months later I'd dream I was in a greenhouse, trying to communicate with a potted plant that was actually, somehow, my grandfather.

          We went back the next morning, my birthday, this time with my grandmother. They'd been divorced more than forty years, which they spent mostly on unfriendly terms—or none at all. But the previous summer, when I'd lived with my dad at my grandmother's house in the Berkeley hills before getting my own place, the eldercare people sometimes carted him over Saturdays in a paratransit vehicle to sit with her on the back patio of the house where, a lifetime ago, they'd had a family. He'd built that patio. They seemed happy in each other's company, two people in their eighties who'd known each other as well as they'd known anyone, even if they hadn't necessarily ever understood one another. I made them breakfast—eggs over easy, bacon, toast, black coffee. My grandfather was delighted. The smell of the eggs was so "enlivening," he said. He kept repeating the word, making me feel oddly proud of myself. He devoted one afternoon to reading my undergraduate thesis, pronouncing it brilliant and making me feel proud again. But mostly, these visits made me feel proud of him, because he used them to paint, producing several messy, abstract islands that would be his last work. 

          My grandmother was in the early stages of Alzheimer's and we weren't sure how much she grasped of the situation. As we stood over his bed, she asked several times how long Rex would be in the hospital, and didn't seem satisfied with the answer that he wasn't going home. To some extent, I shared her confusion. On this day, his eyes were wide open and he was groaning, animal sounds from somewhere deep inside. The doctors said it was a foregone conclusion that he would die, but he sure seemed to be fighting to stay alive. I couldn't help feeling there must have been a part of him that sensed our presence, even if he couldn't squeeze our hands back. Where does the person end, and the biological material begin?

***

          The day was gray and heavy with unfallen rain. Back at my apartment, I spent the afternoon eating cheap ghetto burritos from the neighborhood taqueria with that girl I'd told him not so long ago I might be in love with, and later I went to dinner with friends at a fancy South-of-Market restaurant, where I found myself crying, quietly, in the middle of my entrée, though I couldn't help noticing that the tears were self-conscious—like it's your birthday and you're trying to celebrate, only your grandfather could die within the hour and you want to grieve but you don't know how, so you decide to let people see some of your sadness, maybe because you think it'll help you understand the experience you're having. 

          On December 23rd, back in the hospice, my dad played the violin for my grandfather over the piped-in classical—poorly, but as sincerely as the instrument had ever been played. He'd played it as a child and picked it up again recently. My grandfather's eyes were half-lidded, and his breathing was even, but very shallow. Whatever fight he'd had in him the previous day was gone now. The four of us repeated our now-familiar performances, the attempts to summon statements which adequately represented our feelings and to say them aloud while clutching his hand, while the others watched and listened. I might have recalled the tape-recorded interview I'd conducted with him in the first grade, which he'd interrupted to ask if it was customary for the interviewer to stand on his head while conducting the interview. Or maybe I remembered the spaghetti painting he'd sent one year for my birthday, with the punning phrase "Spagetty looks funny" peeking through messy strands of pasta? Or the "Grandpa Rex" stories my mom used to tell at bedtime after we left my dad, or the stories Grandpa Rex himself told when I came to see him in this hospital, like the time he crossed the border into Juarez after midnight on one cross-country trip, to stand, alone, in an empty bullfighting arena? And whatever I said, was it for him, or for them, or for me?

          That evening, I was eating in a fifties-themed diner when my dad called to tell me Grandpa Rex was gone. Did I want to come see him one last time?

          I don't think I can, I said.

          Call me back if you change your mind.

          My burger and fries swam sickeningly below me, their colors lurid, fake. Five minutes later, I called my dad back. 

          It was strange being at the hospital so late. It was strange that the machines were quiet. Perhaps most strange was how unchanged my grandfather seemed from earlier in the day. He just wasn't alive anymore. It was official. 

          The city lights outside the window had a chilly glitter. My dad played the violin again. When he stopped, he spoke to my grandfather for a long time, and he said something I'll never forget. He said, You're the best friend I ever had.

          It was a true statement, and an extraordinary one. My dad was nine in 1957 when my grandfather abandoned his family for New York, where he stayed for more than two decades, becoming friends with other downtown bohemians, and marrying a colorful Brooklyn girl, and teaching at MOMA, and painting, a lot. When I think of my grandfather leaving, I hear my dad's nasal narration in his autobiographical animated short film—My father left in a borrowed Studebaker with a stack of paintings tied to the roof, he intones, while onscreen, a sedan topped with a few colorful horizontals pulls out of the driveway and cartoons its way down the street. Soon after, my dad destroyed the metal lunchbox my grandfather had painted his name on, an action he's always regretted, and the two of them would see each other only a few times until my dad was in his late teens. But as adults, they were always best friends, peers as much as father and son, caught up together in the intoxication of art, movies, cities, women, drink. And although my dad wound up an animator rather than a fine artist, he'd spend his grown-up life on the same doomed quest of seeking out ways to transform his creative urges into hard cash. 

          Still, I think that my grandfather's departure was a disappointment my dad has never entirely overcome, and that he has spent his entire life reconciling the man my grandfather was with the man he wanted him to be, as I suppose it always is with sons and their fathers. When I started school, my dad asked my grandfather to paint another lunchbox for me—a good luck charm, maybe. It didn't stop our family from falling apart too, a few years later, but it happened in the reverse way, with my mom and brothers and I abandoning him; when we left, he tried to follow, clumsily insisting that even if we were going to be a broken family, we'd still be a family. 

          And that's what we were now, my dad, my brothers, and me, as we stared for the last time at my grandfather's gentle, still face. Finally, we said goodbye and left, a family in a new configuration. As our footsteps echoed through the orangey-yellow light of the hospital's parking garage, I wondered what I would say to my father in thirty years or so, standing by his bedside in a place like this.

***

          My grandfather had a distinctive toast. It always seemed to me as much a sign of good character as a firm handshake. Here's to your beauty, he'd say with a sly smile. There were variations, but beauty was his favorite quality when alcohol was involved.

          On Christmas Day, my father and I sat among the decades-old appointments of my grandmother's musty Berkeley living room and raised our martinis. Here's to your beauty, we told each other gravely. It was a kind of salute.

          In the week before New Year's, we got down to the business of emptying his crappy little apartment. I don't know why I was surprised by the roach corpses in the silverware drawer, or the government food in the cupboards. I also don't know why I was surprised by the books that lined my grandfather's red particle-board shelves—not the art books, but the ones by Kafka, Conrad, Hawkes, Berger, Barthes, Baudrillard, Foucault. These seemed important to preserve, the same way I wanted to hang onto the yellowed clippings of James Baldwin's obituary and an article about the FBI raid on Jock Sturges' studio, and the Playboys and naturist magazines, the endless art supplies, the classical and jazz cassettes, even the ragged, unlovely plants. 

          I told my dad how impressed I was by the titles. Grandpa Rex wanted to be a writer, he replied. In fact, my grandfather had first come to the Bay Area to be a reporter, which was how he'd met my grandmother. He didn't really start painting until he was in his twenties, my dad explained.

          I hadn't known any of this. I'd just entered my twenties, and I wanted to be a writer. Maybe I too would experience such a conversion. My ex-stepmother, a dedicated armchair psychologist, used to claim that certain personality traits skipped a generation. It flattered me to think that this might be true of my grandfather and me. 

          I also found a ring, a sixties artifact made from the handle of a spoon, in a crumpled brown paper bag on the floor of the closet. I don't remember him wearing that, my dad said. But I fancied that maybe he had, and so I tried wearing it for awhile as a tribute, even though it was big and cumbersome and turned my finger black.

          My favorite painting in the room had nothing to do with Chinese calligraphy. My grandfather had made it in his native Spokane in 1981, soon after being evicted from his third-floor loft at 12 St. Mark's Place, in the soon-to-be-gentrified East Village. It's a simple oil-on-board composition, a dense arrangement of soft orange blobs against a turquoise background. Emerging from the blobs along the painting's vertical axis is the flesh-colored suggestion of a slender, regal female body, with voluptuous curves that hint at feet, a breast, a head. It's always looked to me like a celestial creature emerging from the sky, swathed in a burning shroud, the orange shapes at the top suggesting wings and a crown. But, like many of the paintings of my grandfather's I love the best, it teeters at the edge of representation, toying with the viewer's impulse to identify a subject, dissolving into gentle, sensuous abstraction the longer you look. He titled it "Flames," though sometimes I slip up and call it "Angel." I asked my dad if I could take it, and it wound up over my bed, replacing the nude on the bicycle. It has usually hung in my bedrooms since then. Something about it makes me feel protected.

          The rest of the paintings went to my grandmother's, and other precious objects—journals, keepsakes—were saved, but most things—toiletries and prescriptions, old magazines, stacks of junk mail, secondhand kitchenware—went into shiny black garbage bags and out onto the street, the unwanted detritus of a life ended quietly and bleakly. The place was empty by the end of the month, before rent came due. In the first minutes of the year 2000, my dad and I sat on the front steps of a friend's house in North Berkeley smoking cigars that wouldn't stay lit, just two generations of Ashlock men left to greet the twenty-first century.

2000

          My grandfather didn't want a funeral, but in February, my dad arranged an informal memorial at my grandmother's house. Twenty or so people gathered in the dark living room, most elderly, few especially close to my grandfather—most were friends of my grandmother or my aunt, who had declined to make the trip. I gazed through the partially drawn curtains at the cheerful foliage of premature Berkeley spring, so much realer than anything going on in the room, as these strange people offered pale, innocuous reminiscences that faded to oblivion the moment they were uttered. 

          The only story that had anything to do with the Grandpa Rex I knew came from Mao-Pei, who cheerfully recalled the time her mother, visiting for the first time from China, had asked my grandfather to escort her to the O'Farrell Theater, the Mitchell Brothers' famous strip club in the Tenderloin, near my studio. They'd gone at eleven in the morning, drawing stares from the girls. The old people in the room looked at their hands, but the members of my family grinned. This sounded like the real Rex: a man who'd liked sex, and liked Chinese people, and liked doing things that were unexpected.

          When I say the members of my family, I mean my immediate family—my dad, mom, and all three brothers, including Michael, closest to me in age, whom I hadn't spoken to in several years. It was the first time in a decade that we'd all gathered, willingly, in the same place. After the remembering was done, we strolled through the fragrant, crepuscular hills, almost like a real family, my parents at the head of the gang, the four boys all over the streets behind them, teasing, torturing, talking. I was half-drunk from the cheap white wine on my grandmother's sideboard, and kept chastising myself for not treating the occasion with the proper respect. But what would have been any more proper than this?

***

          My father and I marked my grandfather's passing again in March by removing the bulk of his paintings from a tiny chain-linked cage in a storage facility near his old apartment, where they were packed tightly together under accumulated layers of dust. It was the first time I'd seen his corpus as a complete body of work. There were figurative sculptures. There were more nudes, and more distorted perspectives. There were the early Berkeley landscape paintings, and portraits of my father and my aunt as children. There were paintings in the ongoing swimmer series, jade and aquamarine patterns of waves with the ghosts of swimming bodies beneath them. 

          There were also large Rothko-esque color fields from the sixties that seemed to betray the influence of abstract expressionism. I didn't realize he'd done anything like this, I said. It was trendy, my dad returned, though later he'd add that my grandfather had enjoyed making them, and that they prefigured the islands he was painting when he died. As I carried the canvases out to the truck, a stiff San Francisco wind turning them into sails that pulled me down the sidewalk, I imagined my grandfather in his loft on St. Mark's trying to make something that would sell. Maybe he was in the right place at the wrong time; New York belonged to Andy Warhol when he lived there, and he found the climate inhospitable to the lyrical, introspective, painterly sensibilities he'd formed on the West Coast. During his long career, he'd failed to sell more than a few dozen paintings at rock-bottom prices—though he did often trade art for free dental work and other favors. He'd even tried his hand at those tacky paint-by-numbers landscapes you find in schmaltzy tourist galleries, but he couldn't stick to the formula. 

          It seemed so sad and arbitrary that these graceful, whimsical paintings—so conversant in the ideas of twentieth century art, from Picasso to de Kooning, but with a mood and vocabulary all their own—should be so unwanted. I'm biased, but they belonged on bright white museum walls, not wrapped in quilted blue moving blankets in the cargo hold of a rented Mitsubishi Fuso. The situation, I thought, had less to do with the art itself than with my grandfather's lousy self-esteem, which kept him from promoting himself as he should have. He'd gotten that lousy self-esteem from his own father, who despite being a raging son-of-a-bitch, was a pretty fine artist in his own right—which is the reason I'm named after him. My grandfather had passed it along to my dad, who passed a little along to me. Sometimes I hope I only have daughters. 

***

          After my grandfather died, my dad had floated the idea of scattering the ashes on the first day of spring at Point Lobos, near Monterrey, where my grandfather often said he'd fallen in love with painting the sea. But it took us a full year of adjustment before we got our act together, on December 23rd, the first anniversary of his death. We went instead to Ocean Beach, the long, cold, windswept strip of sand on the western flank of San Francisco that's all that remains of the dunes from which the city arose. My grandfather had lived in a house nearby for a few years in the eighties. Nathaniel and Philip were visiting again, and my father's new girlfriend came along, so there were five of us gathered at the edge of the surf under another gloomy, overcast sky to carry out this small ritual.  

          My dad was then conducting his first experiments with Photoshop, and one project had been to doctor the Altoids logo to read "Curiously strong Ashlocks." Now he handed each of us an Altoids tin containing a small portion of my grandfather's ashes, and we drifted apart, each into our own individual reverie, to do what we would with them. I guess we must have been curiously strong to stand by the restless water on this deserted beach, wind whipping our faces, performing our melancholy task. My tin was cold. Seagulls pinwheeled above a distant smudgy horizon that offered just the faintest demarcation between sky and ocean. It looked like one of my grandfather's paintings.

          I was surprised by the solid bone chunks that lay among the soft gray dust. They looked like misshapen mints. I stood still for a few minutes, protecting my allotment of ashes from the wind, then flung them out toward the water. They arced back at me, mostly falling on the sand at my feet, a few finding their way into my eyes and mouth. The body of Rex. I wiped my face. 

          I didn't scatter them all. My father's sister has a story about walking behind my dad and grandfather in New York and seeing them both suddenly turn their heads. An attractive woman crossing the street, she figured, but it turned out to be a dumpster brimming over with stuff, waiting to be scavenged. There's an Ashlockean collector's impulse that makes it almost impossible for us to leave behind any material object with meaning or potential use, even though because we're all so poor, we don't have much room to accommodate our discoveries and mementos. No wonder there was so much useless junk in my grandfather's apartment, and no wonder I wanted to keep it all.

          My father approached. I saved some, I said.

          I have more at home too, he told me.

          I placed the tin carefully inside a jacket pocket as we made our way across the dunes, toward the car.

2004

          Five years after my grandfather's death, I'd long since abandoned California to become a New Yorker too. I didn't feel like I was at the cusp of adulthood anymore, and I was starting to worry that I was letting my life get away from me, the way I'd always felt my grandfather and father had, the way I'd always promised myself I never would.

          I'd become close with my grandfather's younger sister Jane, my great aunt, a former pianist who lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side filled with his paintings—swimmers and big floor-to-ceiling abstracts and a rocky beachscape with an overturned boat from the Berkeley years. Sometimes she'd let slip a memory of my grandfather, like how he taught her to drink Irish whiskey, making sure she understood that Jameson was the good stuff, to be saved for special occasions. When she was in the hospital, not long before she too passed away, I brought her a memory I had, a short typewritten reminiscence my grandfather had once given me in the apartment on Duboce, about standing up to a bully as a kid in Spokane, despite the inevitability of catching hell from his father.

          On December 22nd, I was still at my office on the west side of Chelsea when my dad called to wish me a happy birthday. When we'd finished our usual talk about the movies, I asked if he could remember any of Rex's favorite places in New York. 

          Why do you ask? he said. 

          Well, I'd been carting that tin of curiously strong Ashlocks around ever since the windy day on the beach. It had lived in a desk drawer, wrapped in tissue paper, through six different apartments. Lately, it had felt like a burden. The previous April I'd been burglarized—my grandfather's spoon ring, tucked away with my girlfriend's jewelry, was part of the take—and the thief had gone into my desk and opened up this morbid package, spilling some of the white bone dust across my scissors and batteries and obsolete business cards. I'd removed everything from the drawer and dumped it out onto 2nd Avenue, in the East Village, where I was living then. It depressed me, though I did like the idea of those few stray particles drifting down into the gutters of the sidewalks he'd once strolled along, perhaps making their way up to the doorstep of B&H Dairy, where thirty years earlier you might have found him hunched over the counter with a blintz and a cup of coffee, and now, on the right Saturday morning, you might find me. 

          I didn't know if anybody else was thinking about the fifth anniversary of his death, but I'd gotten the idea to mark the occasion the next day by scattering what I had left, somewhere on the island. It would be a way of honoring his bicoastal identity, and I guess mine, too. Trouble was, I had no idea where the right spot might be. 

          Neither did my dad. I'm sure you've already thought of this, but the place that jumps to mind is 12 St. Mark's, he said.

          I had, and it didn't seem like a location particularly well-suited for the private scattering of ashes. Neither did my dad's next suggestion, the Cedar Tavern. I'd already thought of this as well, since Jane had offered it up a few days earlier.

          Outside my office, the West Side Highway was a chain of blurry red taillights in the early winter rain. Nowhere in Central Park? I asked.A bridge, maybe? A bench in Washington Park?

          My dad didn't have any memories of my grandfather and parks. The only other place I can think of, he said, is the passenger ship terminal on the West Side.

          Soon after my grandfather left in 1957, my grandmother took my father and my aunt to Egypt. They visited briefly with Rex in New York, and waved goodbye to him from the deck of a Greek ocean liner called the Queen Frederica. Through an unlikely sequence of events, they'd returned, third class, on the famous Queen Mary. My dad turned ten back in New York, but he wouldn't see his father again until he was a teenager. In many ways, that Egypt trip, framed by the two stays in New York, marked the end of my father's childhood, at least the part that was innocent.

          The original Queen Mary had retired to Long Beach decades ago, but a few months earlier I'd stood in this very office watching the new Queen Mary 2 glide sluggishly down the Hudson on its maiden transatlantic voyage. I supposed in a weird way the boat tied us together. Anyway, the passenger terminal had the kind of symbolic resonance I was after, and scattering the rest of my grandfather's ashes into the waterway of his other city would close the circle. I'd give it a shot.

***

          It was very late at night when I left my office and set out for the passenger terminal, walking north on the path beside the West Side Highway. The wind roared off the river, much fiercer than at Ocean Beach four years earlier. Manhattan's western fringes were desolate, and for twenty blocks I saw only a few lone bikers struggling against the weather, and cabs careening down the highway. At that precise moment in time, nobody in the world had any idea where I was, or what I was doing.

          As I reached the mid-40s and approached the hulking blue complex, I realized there wasn't any way to get out to the water. I passed by, wondering what I would do. I reached an MTA service pier and strolled past the Caterpillars and cargo vans toward the darkness of the river. A Hispanic guy in a stocking cap ran up, yelling something I couldn't understand.

          I was just trying to get to the water. I smiled lamely. Do you know where I can get to the water?

          He looked at me pityingly. Another half-baked tourist. I started walking away, but he shouted again, waving his arm northward. 

          Riverside Park? I asked. 

          No, he shouted. Trump!

          Right, the condos. Trump had built a meager little waterfront park nearby. I kept heading north. New York felt sci-fi strange as I entered a corridor of high fences that cordoned off construction sites beneath the elevated section of the West Side Highway. It was inky black down there. What if I got mugged, was relieved of these last few ashes? I peeked over my shoulder. No one was coming, and there was no sound except the wind's ghostly howl off the Hudson and the occasional heavy thum of cars overhead. I could have been the only pedestrian in the entire city.

          The path veered out from under the highway to hug a sterile patch of parkland. I'd biked past this stretch countless times on the way to Jane's apartment in the 70s, never thinking of it as a place I'd want to stop. I walked out onto a long pedestrian pier, illuminated at intervals by orangey-yellow park lamps—light that made me think of the hospital garage years earlier. The waves of the river slapped below and Trump's towers leered over the highway behind me. The whole area was an exercise in bland, soulless urban planning. Anywhere, USA. But to the south, the enormous derelict skeleton of Pier D loomed above the water like partially submerged modern sculpture, with the piers of the passenger terminal stretching behind it. To the north, the lights of the George Washington Bridge glimmered, and across the river I could make out the low craggy band of the New Jersey cliffs. It was still New York, all right.

          I kept waiting for someone to yell at me, ask me what the hell I was doing. But I was alone. I reached the end of the pier, halfway to Jersey, and stood in the lashing wind. 

          My fingers were trembling with cold. I pulled the tin from my bag, There was almost nothing inside, just some wan dust, as if it had been used as an ashtray. 

          Goodbye, I said. I gauged the direction of the wind, then tossed the ashes out onto the water. They curved in a brief white puff, counterclockwise around the corner of the pier, coming to rest partly on the water's surface, partly on a wooden pylon. Goodbye. 

          I stared at the river, thinking about everything else it had swallowed up over the centuries. But it was too cold for reverence, so I walked back to land and climbed a staircase under the highway, which led up to an anonymous, sanitized part of town I'd never seen before, built after my grandfather was long gone.

          There were a few people on the streets. The city seemed to have continued breathing without me. My face and hands were numb, but I felt exhilarated as I wandered east, looking for a subway, ready now to go home. 

          Thanks, Grandpa Rex, I thought. So long, and fare thee well. Here's to your beauty—and to mine.