It's impossible to say just how old he was. Seventy at the least, 85 at most. White hair, not too bald, face sagging a bit, but with good healthy color to the skin and a look in the eyes that confirmed with one glance that there wasn't a thing disappeared from his intellect. As the subway came to a halt in the station, just one lone seat opened up in the car. He walked toward the center of the train, in the indirect direction of the vacancy. A young woman slid into the open seat. He didn't seem to mind as he waited for the door to close and then leaned against it again, bending so, so slowly to set his briefcase between his shoes and take the newspaper out of it. The trip back to the upright position was just as slow.

     I returned to reading my book, leaning against the opposite door.

     One stop later, several seats emptied, and I ended up in one out of habit, nose still in my book. But a book isn't a book without the time taken to soak it in, and I looked up for a moment of pondering. The same navy coat on the same old man who had trouble leaning over to reach his briefcase took over my line of vision. The woman who had slid into the one empty seat two stops ago had been silently chastised as I'd tried to cast her a glance of disapproval, and the only means of justification for that now was to offer my seat to the old man. I tugged the arm of his coat gently.

     Would you like to sit down?

     Then, such a look. Of pride. A smile. A pretending to not know why on earth I would ask him such a thing.

     No, he answered with his reproving mock befuddlement, a pursing of the lips, a shake of the old head, and just a hint of a sympathetic smile.

     And then me near tears, looking down at my book pretending to return to the reading, staring at one word and trying to decide which is worse; denying a seat when a seat is needed or implying to a person that he is older than he feels.

     It's circumstantial. But I had chosen wrong this time.

     The woman who'd slid into the lone empty seat should have allowed him the chance to take the space, covertly, as if as an afterthought. We could have looked the other way, then. Forcing it upon him was not decent like that scenario would have been. I only rubbed it in by being young and female.

     I would have looked at me with mock befuddlement, too.

     Defiance: Seats opened up a stop later. He held his ground. I came closer to tears.

      First they stop carding you at bars. And then eventually, decades later, this.

     I exited the train before him.

     The old man's wife died ten years ago. He still lives in the house they shared. He'd always loved her, for the most part, and now it seems that even the times he hadn't, he really had.

     And even the times of pain had been lovely. Not just with her, but with all of it.

     There is a network of friends. It isn't as lonely as it might be. And there are the shelves of books that still have not been gotten around to. There's more to do now than ever, in a way. Although there are persistent thoughts of how long will be too long.

     And this wasn't how old age was expected to feel, aside from the nagging frustration when things take longer than they used to. Old age was meant to be futile, a lame-duck period. Instead, he is still reinventing himself.

     Sex is not missed, but women are. Stolen glances from young pretty strangers. Possibility, in that now there is none. It makes her all the more missed. He can't remember if she was objectively beautiful or not.

     The picture of his great grandfather hangs on the wall of the landing of the stairwell in the gold oval frame, just as it has every day now for 34 years. He notices with astonishment that his great grandfather looks younger in this shot than he himself does in the bathroom mirror, and in fact was younger in this picture than he himself is now. He thinks about this poetically. Is there any other way?

     He still lives as if it's all for nothing except the thing itself. Love for love, a good deed just to know that you're capable of it, a good drink for the candor it lets you in on. He's offered an acknowledgement that it's going nowhere in the end so it must be as good as it can be made now. That's why things always seemed to fall into place on their own for him, he is more sure of than ever.

     He's often lonely. But it was like that in his youth, too.

     Yes, but…

     And this is where that word possibility pops up again.

     In some ways, he decides, it still exists. He chuckles. That's what old people do, after all, now that it would be ridiculous to giggle.

     Part of growing older is learning to retain the things that keep one young, he told me. I joked that according to such logic, he possessed more youth than me.

     London was what it was; New York, only older and more set in its ways, more respectful of its own long-gone youth.

     And with cleaner subways, with more and better seating.

     There was no need to bemoan the path of life, because we had risen above it, wandering in the streets remembering a childhood long past.

     It's what happens, he'd told me artlessly about aging and the surrender of possibility.

     Then let's never grow old.

     Yes, let's not.

     It was an ideal day (for London). We walked and walked and it was timeless. The sun kept us just warm enough. I'd never seen so many white houses.

     But it was too late.

     Already, bartenders don't card me.