"Long day?" It was a typical cabdriver to client question, but something in the way it was delivered felt a bit more sincere to me at that moment - the end of a really long day that started about 18 hours ago. I was a little preoccupied by the fact that I had to catch a train upstate in 18 minutes and the Lyft app was  telling me that this ride would take 17 minutes. I asked him if he could get there as quickly as possible then sat back and let fate take over. I'd make it or I wouldn't. But the prospect of having to wait until 2am for the next train at Grand Central wasn't appealing. The ride took me through my old neighborhood of Greenpoint and even from a distance it looked and felt hard to recognize. The driver and I slipped into familiar banter about New York neighborhoods; how they had changed, and how expensive things had gotten. It's a conversation so cliched that it's become like the weather for strangers - a universal phenomenon that affects everyone.  He was from East New York - a neighborhood so bad that it has managed to avoid being gentrified. Earlier in the night I was with old friends in a Williamsburgh that was now fully unrecognizable to anyone who knew it before 2010 or so. Anyone who lived there and then moved away can't help saying, "what happened to this place?" every few steps when confronted with a gleaming new glass storefront selling insultingly expensive items that used to be a vegetarian sandwich shop or dingy video store. My friend's wife accused him of sounding like an old man. But the speed of change in hyper-gentrified neighborhoods makes old men and women of us all. At the reunion of my group of friends the talk went where it always went after a few drinks  - to old stories and old jokes - comfortably threadbare like a familiar sweater. It was an antidote to the new world that was springing up around us - that springs up around everyone as they age. A compass reading that's fixed.

As the minutes ticked down my driver pulled up to Grand Central and I jumped out with 2 minutes to go. I ran through the station and when I reached the platform I saw a few other stragglers ahead of me and the conductor leaning out of the front window. When he saw me running he made a hand gesture as if to say "slow down, there's still time".