He was nearly sixty years older than me, though his face easily looked fifteen years younger than his age. I found him sitting in a wheelchair, staring out the plate glass window. He didn’t need the wheelchair; he was able to walk. This was the seat he found, though.

Outside was the urban sprawl of New York City: the skyscrapers, a nearby river, a couple of bridges. The sky was hazy and the air was cold. His hands were resting in his lap.

Many of the wrinkles in his face disappeared when he greeted me with his smile. In his younger years, he was undoubtedly handsome. Though he had commented that he had become more cantankerous with age, he still had a good sense of humor and used it liberally.

“Why make things worse?” he commented.

He told me that he was leaving the hospital that afternoon. I didn’t realize that he would be discharged so soon.

“See that building over there?” he asked, energetically pointing a wrinkled finger at a shiny structure jutting into the sky. “I live over there and about ten blocks up.”

I nodded and smiled.

“New York has changed,” he said, maybe more to himself than to me. “It’s not what it used to be, that’s for sure.”

Though the city had changed, his New York accent certainly had not over the years.

“How so?” I asked. My West Coast accent (or, perhaps more accurately, my lack of a New York accent) immediately betrays that I am not a local.

“Oh, there weren’t so many buildings,” he lamented, using his arm to indicate the swath of island that, presumably, was unoccupied when he was a boy. “Now, it’s all business. All of it is business. New York has lost its character.”

I looked out at the concrete forest with its towering trees of steel, stone, and bright lights and tried to imagine the city through his eyes. Maybe it was more of a checkerboard of walk-ups, brownstones, and churches? Perhaps I would see more fire escapes and terraces with beautiful iron work. Maybe there wouldn’t be so many trucks and cars crossing the suspension bridges. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so simultaneously crowded and lonely.

“I bet it has changed a lot over the years,” I reflected. “And even though it may not be the city it once was, people still want to come here.”

It was a personal disclosure, of course.

“Oh, yes,” he enthusiastically agreed. “People from all over the world want to come to New York City. There is no city like it—even now, even with all the changes its gone through. New York is a special place. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

I smiled and silently agreed. He put his hands back into his lap and continued to look out the window.

A tugboat floated down the dark river. The hazy sunlight bounced off the glassy skyscrapers. A parade of buses and taxis crept along the avenue down below. Tiny people weaved along the sidewalks.

We were both in New York. Neither one of us said anything.