I flew to Detroit yesterday for a job interview. The interview went fine. The city is what stuck with me.

I’d been hearing about Detroit’s decline for as long as I can remember. Since the crash, at least. People I talked to while I was there traced it further back, to the crack epidemic, to decades of disinvestment before that. The specifics of when it started matter less than what it looks like now: city blocks with a single house surrounded by nothing but grass, and that house itself falling apart. Block after block of it.

But Detroit’s not dead. It’s not dying. It’s hurt. There’s a difference.

I visited the Motown Museum, the spiritual birthplace of a sound that changed American music. I saw the Henry Ford Hospital and its new expansion wings, an institution still investing in the community. There are signs of life everywhere if you’re looking for them. They’re just standing next to a lot of pain.

My Uber driver from the airport was named Al. Same name as my father-in-law, who we buried two weeks ago. Al was proud of his city. He showed me around, asked me trivia questions about what I knew about Detroit, told me about the things that mattered to him. Everything Henry Ford built. The way the city pioneered industrialization. The fact that it’s on the upswing. He wanted me to see it the way he sees it: not the blight, but the comeback.

I was there to interview at a company focused on manufacturing. Bringing industrialization back to America. Building things here, with American workers, in American factories. Standing in a facility in Detroit watching that happen felt different than reading about it.

I flew back to Nashville, and frankly, Nashville doesn’t look that much better in a lot of places. More cranes, more construction, more visible effort to clean things up. But the underlying work is similar. Cities trying to improve themselves. New industries forming. Old rust being scraped off and replaced with something that might hold.

I don’t have a grand thesis here. I’m not going to pretend a one-day visit makes me an expert on Detroit or manufacturing policy or the state of American industry. I’m just a guy who flew somewhere for a job interview and came home thinking about what I saw.

I believe in making things in America. American tools, American products, American jobs. We’ve got a lot of ground to make up and a lot that’s been taken from us over the last several decades. But people like Al are still proud. Cities like Detroit are still trying. Companies are still building factories and hiring people to work in them.

I’m proud of my country. I’m proud of my town. We’ve got a lot of work to do.