The gyro man, an Arab, is cooking a burger for a large black man in maroon sweatpants. Someone must have told a joke, because both of them are laughing loudly. They keep laughing as the cook tosses the burger into the sea air. The meat reaches its apogee, flips over twice, plunges down again, splat against the grill.

Now, my walk done, I could finally call my wife, ask her if she didn't mind coming to pick me up. Not much had changed in the three days of my disappearance. The 16-year-old still liked Björk; the 12-year-old still didn't clean her room. I suppose I could have walked back to the Slope, but there was no time. I'm the assistant coach of my 9-year-old son's basketball team, and there was a game that night. We lost our first four, won a couple, lost some more. Nonetheless, my son, who wears No. 6, in honor of Dr. J, whom he has never seen play, thinks we could get good. He's optimistic like that. Sometimes we walk around the city together, two more generations of New York dudes, just looking around. The other day, we walked under Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Beside the massive anchorage, some boys had collected several dozen horseshoe crabs and were flinging the ancient animals out into New York Bay like prehistoric Frisbees. My son said this was all right; the crabs wouldn't be hurt since they were "living fossils" that had "always been there and always would be." That sounded okay, so we turned around and walked home.

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• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Mark Jacobson
• Table of Contents: Jun 14, 1999 issue of New York | Subscribe!