As a child, I used to feel disappointed whenever we traveled from Boston toward western Massachusetts and passed by the signs pointing toward New York City. Almost always my father continued driving straight to Holyoke, the city where he had grown up and where some of his family members still lived. How much more exciting it would be to visit New York, I always thought, instead of the dull place where my relatives lived.

This memory floats back when, as an adult, I do take the New York City exit and visit that metropolis every once in a while. Seeing the skyline as I approach Manhattan still evokes in me a sense of wonder that so much dynamism can be packed into one small island.

My attitude toward this place is like that of Samuel Johnson toward the London of his day. “When a man is tired of London,” he told his industrious biographer Boswell in 1777, “he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” And when you are celebrating a significant anniversary as my wife and I were, where better than New York?

I love the variety of people one sees on the streets of Manhattan. Millions of them come at you displaying all the colors of the human family and speaking many of the languages in use throughout the world. And at all hours of day and night; pulsating human life never retires from the streets. Yes, I realize that those streets are mean for many: you see wrecks of humanity scraping out mere existence from an environment not friendly to them.

But you also see surprising pockets of mercy. While traveling down Second Avenue on a municipal bus, I was intrigued to see the driver stop the vehicle, get up, and walk toward the back. There he lowered a platform and then raised it, accommodating a man with disabilities sitting in a motorized chair. Public transportation halted during rush hour, delaying dozens of people in their journeys home, in order to provide a place for a person who could not otherwise get where he wanted to go. The Americans with Disabilities Act had proven itself once again.

Shamelessly, I love to listen as New Yorkers converse. Sitting cheek by jowl with two ladies in a restaurant, I could not help but take mental notes of their conversation for my folder on practical gerontology.

“Most women our age have a lot of problems,” one of the ladies told her companion. As a possible remedy, she spoke approvingly of some anti-wrinkle stuff costing 45 dollars a jar. “She’s had her face done,” she reported about a mutual acquaintance. Of another she said, “When she drinks the night before, she looks older.”

The same speaker’s chief concern, however, was not aging, but where to get her hats blocked. No one seemed to be offering this service anymore but she thought a cobbler’s shop might be worth trying. She also wondered about taking a risk management seminar offered by an investment firm but was hesitating because, to quote unladylike language, “they’re all bullshitters.”

On another occasion I asked a cop the best way to get from our hotel to Lincoln Center. He replied in perfect “poy and koughee” New Yorkese, suggesting a taxi. I do not yet need subtitles to understand the language but I do consider it a subspecies of English.

The view of the East River from our 38th floor room was spectacular and ever changing. We looked over the United Nations buildings with their flags representing the peoples of the world. To the side, a ninety-story tower purporting to be the tallest residential building in the world, testified to the vaulting ambition of its developer, Donald Trump. Gazing at this monument to pretension, I saw manifest the daunting power of this island’s movers and shakers.

A play by Edward Albee stirred in me once more the power of dramatic art. “The Play About the Baby” has something of a gerontological theme that held me fixed, as did the marvelous performances of two veteran actors, Marian Seldes and Brian Murray.

The two younger actors appeared naked, fleetingly alas, in a display that I associate with New York sophistication. These two parents of new baby receive from their elders, what a New Yorker capsule review calls “a harsh taste of what life has in store .  .  . the ravages of adulthood.”

This column does not intend to serve as a mini travelogue nor an ad for tourism. It’s just that New York ties together some themes that have run throughout my long life and renews my appreciation for vibrant living. The cliches about the city are true: it’s altogether too crowded and many people living there are brash. But, as Dr. Johnson suggested so memorably of London, you’ve got to be tired of living not to love New York.

Richard Griffin