Late last year when I climbed about as high as one can climb up the City Hall tower, I lifted the metal shades that cover the windows closest to the base of the flagpole. I looked out at the panoramic view of Milwaukee and my mind immediately went to one thing.

Well, to one person. I thought about my grandfather, a lifelong Milwaukeean, who passed away six years after I moved here. I'm not sure why he was my first thought. In part, it's likely because my view was out toward the Milwaukee Center, on whose pay phones (remember those?!) I learned that he'd been taken by ambulance to the hospital on the day he died ... a Friday the 13th.

But it goes deeper than that. If I looked a bit further west, just across the river, I could see one of the buildings where he worked and where he took us for a visit once when I was a kid. Two buildings down is Usinger's, where my grandparents would take us on each visit to Milwaukee.

Out another window I could see the white wood frame church I can see every day from my window at work, too. That church was just up the street from where my grandfather lived his entire life. He was born in the house in which he lived when he died.

That part of my family settled on the near South Side upon arrival from Germany in 1877 and didn't leave until the end of the 20th century. My children are the first generation to have never lived in that house on Greenfield Avenue.

But despite that small residential orbit for 100-plus years, my family is written across this town and I can hardly pass a day here without seeing a place or hearing of something that reminds me of my grandfather especially. Though I lived far from him for most of my life, he loomed large even when I was a child. We loved visiting and spending time with him.  He had a great sense of humor.

He worked in printing by trade, but was a passionate photographer and inveterate tinkerer. He married an aspiring artist and in 1940s photographs of them with friends, they look like a fun-loving, spirited bunch.

My grandmother was born in small-town – and I mean small-town – Indiana and went to high school in Michigan. She came to Milwaukee, where her sister already lived, to attend the Layton School of Art.

With all of the recent hoopla surrounding the anniversary of Milwaukee Art Museum, which was part of the same family of institutions as the Layton School and Gallery, she's popped to mind pretty often lately, too.

When I hear about folks like Alfred Pelikan and Charlotte Partridge, I wonder if she knew them, and what she thought of them. I wonder, had she lived, would she have had a career ahead of her as an artist? She died when she – and her daughter, my mother, – were very young and so that sequence of events becomes, for me, an exercise in melancholia.

Sometimes, I look around and try to see the city through my grandparents' eyes, but so much has changed, I can't usually muster a clear picture. Usually, I end up wondering what they'd think of the city today.

When I find myself in the lantern atop St. Josaphat, or on the roof at Wisconsin Gas touching the weather flame, I want to tell them all about it. When I hear about landmark events in Milwaukee history during their lifetimes, I wish they were here to tell me about it.