This is the first installment of my interview series, Interviews With a Ghost, in which I write Rolling Stones-esque exposés on great individuals who are not alive anymore. Yeah, they're fictional. But it's more fun to pretend if they're not. Enjoy.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, but Teddy Roosevelt is a ghost. By the time I cross Central Park West to meet him at our designated rendezvous point—the bronze equestrian statue of him that stands guard outside the Museum of Natural History—by the time I am within ten feet of him, he is already moving. I have to shuffle my feet a bit to catch up with him. Even then, it’s hard to keep his pace. He takes big, decisive strides. His glasses flash in the early morning sunlight.

“I will tell you this,” he booms, “I have a hankering for a full Scottish breakfast.”

I ask him if ghosts can eat. He snorts and waves that aside. “That never stopped me,” he says, and then laughs, a thundering, raucous laugh that sends nearby pigeons fluttering and elicits some dirty looks from passerby. Roosevelt takes no notice. Why should he? Dead or alive, he is a force to be reckoned with.

Later that morning, we’re sitting at a corner booth in the bistro, and he tells me a story. His face is animated, his cheeks flushed, his hands swing wildly, and his resounding voice fills the tiny restaurant and drowns out other conversations. It’s the first time I’ve truly understood the phrase “to command a room.” He’s hardly touched his haggis (which he’s informed me he can eat, as They allowed him a corporeal body for this interview. When I pressed him for who exactly They were, he told me to ask another question).

I’ve just inquired about what he missed most about being alive. I expected this to be a difficult question, since when Roosevelt lived, he really lived—from his wealthy childhood in New York City, to living and working on a ranch in the Badlands, to commanding a Rough Rider regiment in the Spanish-American War, to becoming Governor of New York and then President of the United States. But to my surprise, Roosevelt launched into an immediate answer.

“Movement!” he exclaims. “I miss movement. Being on the go, the journey of it all. We, human creatures, are meant to move...I remember when the Panama Canal was starting to look more and more unfeasible, and the Panamanians began to quibble over the particulars of the recent treaty. I remember saying to my man down there, I said, ‘Phillipe, in the end, if given the choice between progress and stagnancy, humans choose progress.’ And I believe I was proven correct. The Canal exists, does it not?”

A concerned look comes over his face. “It does still exist, doesn’t it?” I assure him that it does, and confidence returns. He grins fiercely. “Well, there you go then. Once more, I am vindicated.”

As Roosevelt speaks, he constantly re-situates himself in his seat, adjusting and re-adjusting, tweaking his glasses, loosening his tie and then tightening it again. The man cannot sit still. As we converse in this bistro, it is easy for me to see how such a man could do all the things that he has done. Harvard graduate, accomplished naturalist and ornithologist, New York City police commissioner, successful climber of the Matterhorn, Nobel Peace Prize winner, author of 18 books, founder of the National Parks, a leader of a Smithsonian-sponsored big game hunting expedition in Africa, and of course, two-term president of the United States. When listed together like that, the accomplishments seem incongruous, impossible. But believe me, when you’re in his presence, there’s no question about any of it.

We spend all day talking and walking. We leave the bistro and hop on the 6 train to get off near E 20th Street, the area of Manhattan where Roosevelt grew up.

We pass traffic cones and Kia Sorentos and falafel stands, and I wonder constantly how he is adjusting to the New York of the twenty-first century. The last time he was alive in this city was 1919. At that point, motor vehicles had only existed for a little over ten years. Every man and woman dressed in the utmost respectability: suits, jackets, hats. The city was just beginning to manage the mass tonnage of people that flowed through its streets. But now, yellow taxi cabs! Hamilton! Cupcake shops! Apple stores! Dumpsters!

It seems like it would all be jarring, but Roosevelt shakes his head. “Not in the least! If it weren’t this way, I would be profoundly disappointed.”

I ask him what he means, and he gestures around him. “Why, this! It’s been a century since I roamed these streets and feels exactly so. The world has changed dramatically. We have advanced as a species. Why wouldn’t I be delighted by all of this?”

(While he was speaking, I rethought my plan to take him to the Build-A-Bear Workshop on 46th and 5th. There is, of course, not more evident example of Teddy Roosevelt’s influence on the world than the pervasiveness of the Teddy Bear. But for his one day of being alive once more, I chose to let him be impressed by our world rather than disheartened. Selfish? Perhaps. But I do not regret it in the least.)

As I look back on my notes of our time together, there was one instance in particular that encapsulates the person of Teddy Roosevelt. We’re crossing through Central Park, on the way to an Upper East Side bistro that Roosevelt assures me has the best haggis in the city. As we’re walking, he falls silent for a moment. His gaze turns to the greenery around us, to the trees and the foliage and the flowers. It’s April, and the sparsity of New York City winter is giving way to exuberant spring. As I watch his face, I swear I see the shimmer of tears in his eyes. But he blinks, and it’s gone.

“Do you know,” he says, “when I was in office, I used to go horseback riding in Rock Creek Park?” (Rock Creek Park was—and is—a massive urban park in Washington, D.C.) He sighs. “I don’t suppose they let you do that anymore.”

To me, that is Theodore Roosevelt Jr.: the kind of man the world just doesn’t allow anymore. Well-read yet fierce, emotional yet rugged, strategic yet purposeful, loved by many yet fervently despised by a few—Roosevelt possesses all of these qualities and more. Most could only hope to have one or two of these attributes. But Roosevelt is a great man, not in the sense of character (I leave that to your judgment), but in stature, in nature, in action. Roosevelt would have made a difference, no matter what he did. You can tell this just by standing near him. He was born to be great. You don’t meet many people like that anymore.

That night, as I walked him back to the Natural History Museum, we approach the Roosevelt equestrian statue, and he glances up at his own image. He reaches out to touch the bronze hoof of the horse. Then he looks back at me. “Bully!” he cries out. “What a glorious day. Wouldn’t you agree?”

I do. We shake hands, and he flickers for a moment. Then he is gone. I am left standing with his bronze likeness, a serviceable rendition, but as I now know, ultimately hollow. It doesn’t do him justice.