Spent most of the day in Chinatown, missing Shanghai for all of its food and friendship. In the square near the 天下为公 gate two men play chess to the crowd around them, and not ten feet away is a card table with some form of 抖地主 being played by four young men, each relishing the opportunity to show their cards emphatically, nearly bringing the table down.

I don’t spend much time in Chinatown. Nothing is the same. Many of the restaurateurs are from Hong Kong or Vietnam and little Mandarin is heard in the streets. But today I have a mission.

I have yet to find a restaurant that serves even a passable version of 干煸刀豆, but I don’t really need anything edible today. Only an effigy, a totem to a lingering memory and a lost friend.

Once upon a time in China, there was a big man with big meathooks for hands and a big square jaw that could eat as much as two Chinese men half his size. Which he did. Often. This man loved green beans and would eat two full plates in a sitting, with a large, often warm beer. His hands dwarfed restaurant chopsticks into little more than glorified toothpicks, and the fumbling manner with which food transferred from plate to mouth belied the sheer volume of consumption. He was, above most things, an eater.

It was in eating that I often found myself in his company, all over the world, and in eating how I passed my last night with him. In each of my memories of this albatross of a man–a good meal, a pre-meal snack, a road-side bite… Whenever possible, green beans adorned the tables we shared, in oil and garlic and unidentifiable numbers of mouth-numbing peppers. As soon as they arrived they were ushered out, into our mouths (more his than mine) and the annals of our time together, another plate in the history of all of us.

In Boston such beans are scarce, so I track down the closest thing I can lay hands on and wait for the predictably flimsy styrofoam container to arrive so I can set out on the T. Five stops on the red line from Downtown Crossing to Harvard, each station’s departure marked by a visible increase in the leaking juices from those soggy beans into the semi-transparent plastic bag I carry in my right hand.

From the Harvard T it’s a short walk to the water and the boathouse. Its 2:30pm on a Wednesday and the boathouse is closed. So much the better, I don’t really want to talk to anyone today.

It’s a crazy thing, saying goodbye. Mostly it’s for me, why I am here with my shoes off, knee deep in the Charles River. I know it doesn’t really matter to him any more. But I would like some closure and I need some sort of ritual to get it, a symbol to mark this passing in my head–otherwise, reunion will always be just another meal away. Here on the Charles, where I know he spent the mornings before I knew him, I say goodbye in the way that made the most sense between us–a plate of green beans into the river of our past.

Now my pant legs are soaking and I am alone on the shore, sitting on a park bench watching the Cape Cod masses stroll by in the afternoon of their lives. I think I will sit here a little longer, thinking about how quickly the Charles ate those beans and marveling at a man who ate as fast as the river.