I live in a building on the Upper West Side that ís filled with Brazilians, Eastern Europeans (some of whom survived the Holocaust) and artists like me.

When I moved in, Sam was the one you spoke to about living arrangements. Bald and bespectacled, he was expressionless and full of energy, and liberally sprinkled his English with Hebrew and Yiddish phrases. He spoke at least a half dozen languages.  Most of them sounded like he was gargling and choking at the same time.  He was a different kind of old--the kind that was so world weary, a simple chat with him about the weather would exhaust me internally to the point of momentary collapse. He had a number tatooed on his forearm, "from camp," he would laugh.  I liked the strange dark stories he would tell.  Sometimes we would sit at the front desk and talk about the Ottoman Empire. He always called me Haddassah.  Pretty soon, everyone else did, too.

On warm days, the residents would sit outside on folding chairs and fan themselves well into the night. The front area of the building became their porch. It was Sam who taught me how to greet the older residents properly in Bulgarian. Eventually I learned how to greet them in their native languages as I came and went--Polish, Croatian, Romanian, Russian. It was nothing complex, just hello usually, but it seemed to say so much more than that, that I'd made the effort to speak. One day, someone engaged me in a discussion they were having, and the next thing you know I had fallen into the habit of sitting amongst them and chatting for awhile before I went upstairs.

It was quite a circle.

Most of the ones who aren't gone yet have gone senile. Their children drive in from places like Syracuse and empty their apartments and take them away to hospitals and old folks homes. They waste away, longing for their independence, for real food, for someone to talk to.

The other day, I realized I'd forgotten all the Latvian I knew and that kind of hurt a little.  I remembered the old lady with the deep voice who talked just like Marlene Dietrich and sat by the door in the late afternoons. She would always correct me until I said "good evening" just right. I think of her sometimes, the way she would smile at me in such a delicate way and touch my forearm when I spoke to her.  Tiny speckled hands.  Pale watery world-weary eyes.

Sam had a heart attack and died a few years back, so there's no one to talk to about the Croatian uprising that initiated World War I. And Harry. He's the moil who, when I asked him what he used to do for a living, told me, "I sharpened pencils."

I still have Norman, though. He loves classical music. He's always stopping me on the sidewalk to tell me about the latest nuance of passion he's sensed in the most recent Beethoven piece he's listened to. Or William, who's red-headed and angry and covered with freckles. He sits outside smoking cigars and complaining about governmental waste and middle management. And all the Polish/Romanian maintenance men who work and live in the building, most of whom speak no English at all.

New York City is not America.  At least, not the New York City I live in.