My favotite Book

[Slacker]

A Drinking Life.

 

 

I grew up in the same part of Brooklyn as Pete Hamill, and i read everything this man has written. My favorite from this book is this paragraph

 

In large part, my father's absence was caused by his work. He left home before I awoke and returned after I was asleep. So in some ways, I didn't really miss him. He wasn't in my presence often enough to be physically missed. Besides, I was too busy learning the names of the world and even having small adventures. Once I went to Prospect Park with Billy Kelly, the boy who lived on the first floor. He was my first friend, a year older than I was, and his family owned 471 Fourteenth Street, the house where we lived on the top floor. Our adventure began in a very simple way. Billy said, Let's go to the park. And I said, Okay, let's go to the park.

 

 

Very simple!

 

 

[Slacker]

Prospect Park is part of Park Slope Brooklyn, NY

 

This is the place were i was born and still dream about.

 

I hope you would look into and enjoy this book.

 

 

By: Pete Hamill

 

 

 

 

 

AT THE BEGINNING of my remembering, I am four years old and we are living on the top floor of a brick building on a leafy street in Brooklyn, a half block from Prospect Park. Before that place and that age, there is nothing. But in those remembered rooms are my mother, my younger brother Tommy, and me. It is the winter of 1939. I remember the kitchen, with its intricately patterned blue-and-red linoleum floors, and windows that opened into a garden where an elm tree rose higher than the house. The kitchen light was beautiful: suffused with a lemony green in summer, dazzling when winter snow garnished the limbs of the elm tree. I remember the smell of pine when my mother mopped the floors. I remember her whistling when she was happy, which was most of the time. I remember how tall she seemed then, and how shiny her brown hair was after she had washed it in the sink. And I remember my brother Tommy, two years younger than I, small and curly-haired and gentle. I don't remember my father.

 

He was there, all right. Billy Hamill wasn't one of those Depression fathers who went for a loaf of bread at the corner store and never came back. He moved through those rooms. He slept in one of the beds. He shaved in the bathroom and bathed in the tub. But for me, he wasn't there. In some ways it made no difference. On summer afternoons, I would sit outside the house, in a patch of earth near the curb, playing with a small red fire engine, telling myself stories.

Perhaps my father was in those stories. But he didn't take me on those long green walks through the endless meadows and dark woods of Prospect Park. My mother did. Nor did he take me to see my first movie. My mother did that too. It was The Wizard of Oz, and the streets were dark when we came out of the Sanders Theater and she took my hand and we skipped home together, singing Off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, because because because because Because. I have no memory of him bouncing me on his knee or looking at the drawings I made each day with my box of eight Crayolas. I remember sitting on the stoop, watching Japanese beetles gnaw the ivy that covered the face of the brownstone next door and my mother teaching me a little song to be crooned to another insect neighbor: Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your child is alone. . . . But I learned no songs from my father. Not then.

 

In large part, my father's absence was caused by his work. He left home before I awoke and returned after I was asleep. So in some ways, I didn't really miss him. He wasn't in my presence often enough to be physically missed. Besides, I was too busy learning the names of the world and even having small adventures. Once I went to Prospect Park with Billy Kelly, the boy who lived on the first floor. He was my first friend, a year older than I was, and his family owned 471 Fourteenth Street, the house where we lived on the top floor. Our adventure began in a very simple way. Billy said, Let's go to the park. And I said, Okay, let's go to the park.

 

And yet I knew that what we were doing was full of risk. Most important of all, it was the first time I'd ever gone anywhere without my mother and this act could lead to punishment. She might get cross. She might spank me. I went anyway, trusting Billy Kelly, certain we would be back before my mother noticed I was gone. I crossed the wide avenue called Prospect Park West, following the vastly more experienced Billy, watching for the trolley cars and the few big boxy black automobiles that moved through the streets in those days. We plunged into the park and wandered through that green world whose trees loomed high above us. Soon we were lost. We crossed streams, gazed at lakes, threw stones into the woods, but never could find the familiar playground and low stone wall beyond which lay home. I was filled with panic. I might never see my mother again or my brother Tommy or the kitchen at 471. We could end up in jail or someplace called the Orphanage, where they put kids without parents.

 

We were still in the park at dusk, when my mother found us. Her eyes were wide and angry, probably frantic. She did nothing to Billy Kelly; that was not her right. But she spanked me.

 

I've been looking everywhere for you, Peter, she said sharply. You had me worried sick.

 

I cried all the way home, full of remorse, and shocked too, because I had never before seen my mother angry, certainly not at me. And then we were at the house, going up the stoop in silence and into the vestibule and up the stairs to the top floor. Then, suddenly, quietly, she hugged me. And fed me. And put me to bed. The day had been the most turbulent of my short life; but from beginning to end, my father played no part in it at all.

 

In the summer of 1940, my mother started taking Tommy and me to visit my father where he worked.

 

You should be very proud of your daddy, my mother said. He only finished the eighth grade and he is working as a clerk. The reason is his beautiful handwriting.

 

She didn't explain what a clerk was, but she did show me his handwriting on some sheets of ruled paper. I was just learning to print the alphabet on the same kind of paper, and the shape and steadiness of my father's handwriting did seem very beautiful. He was working at the main off ice of a Brooklyn grocery chain called Thomas Roulston & Sons and brought home nineteen dollars a week. The Roulston company was housed in a red brick factory building near the Gowanus Canal, more than a mile from where we lived. My mother would pack a lunch for him and put Tommy in a stroller and off we would go, first crossing along the park side, then marching block after block, down the great slope. From Ninth Street, I could see all the way to the harbor, where there were ships on the water as small as toys. I loved arriving down near the canal, where the Smith and Ninth Street station of the Independent subway line rose high above us on a concrete trestle. On some days, a drawbridge would groan and squeal, rising slowly to allow some tough squat tugboat to plow through the canal's oily waters to the harbor. There was a mountain of coal on one of the hanks and a machine for unloading it off barges and another for putting it on thin-wheeled trucks with odd sloped fronts like the points of steam irons. I'd wait beside the bridge with Tommy while my mother took her plump brown paper bag up to my father's office. He never once came down to the street to say hello to us.

 

But I do remember him sitting in the kitchen one bright Sunday afternoon in May. Suddenly among us there was a fat blond baby in a tiny crib. A white cake lay on the table and my father was there, bigger than he'd ever seemed before. He was celebrating his own birthday and the birth of my sister, Kathleen.

 

Through the door that afternoon came Uncle Tommy, gruff, friendly, my father's brother, and his wife, Aunt Louie, followed by another brother named Uncle David, tall and lean and grave, and his wife, Aunt Nellie, who was chubby and large and laughed a lot. Behind them came other men, great huge men with sour smells clinging to their jackets and enormous feet encased in shiny leather. They all wore hats and smoked cigarettes and laughed very loudly and drank beer from tall glasses and giant brown bottles. After a while, one of them began to sing, a sad mournful song. When he was finished my father rose and started singing too. His song was funny. His eyes danced, he smiled, he gestured with his hands to emphasize a point, used his eyebrows for other points, and when he was finished they all cheered. The baby cried. My mother picked her up and went into the other room while my father filled his glass with beer, took a long drink and started into another song. For a long time, I sat on the floor near the window, watching this magic show.

[GeddyRulz]

I've met Pete Hamill. He wrote an article about his tuberculosis and how to solve the homeless problem (homeless people spread TB), and the television crew I was interning for went and interviewed him about it in Greenwich Village.

[Slacker]

QUOTE (GeddyRulz @ Oct 26 2006, 04:58 AM)

I've met Pete Hamill. He wrote an article about his tuberculosis and how to solve the homeless problem (homeless people spread TB), and the television crew I was interning for went and interviewed him about it in Greenwich Village.

I hope you had a chance to chat with him.

[GeddyRulz]

QUOTE (SlackABob @ Oct 26 2006, 11:07 AM)

QUOTE (GeddyRulz @ Oct 26 2006, 04:58 AM) I've met Pete Hamill.  He wrote an article about his tuberculosis and how to solve the homeless problem (homeless people spread TB), and the television crew I was interning for went and interviewed him about it in Greenwich Village. I hope you had a chance to chat with him.   Not really. I was a measly young intern - a production assistant, who has the honor of carrying all the camera equipment but few other duties. I intuited that part of my job was to keep the f*ck quiet, and let the others have all the fun and glory. If I did open my mouth, the first thing I would've said is, "Mr. Hamill, your glasses are crooked." He did the entire interview with his glasses sitting off-kilter on his nose. We used the footage anyway, but he looks a little silly.   I've since learned more about Hamill, though, and he seems like an interesting and nice guy. He's a baseball fan, and a friend of sportswriter Mike Lupica; he encouraged Lupica to write the baseball book Summer of '98, which was a good read. Can't say I've read anything by Hamill, although my in-laws had an old novel of his laying about.

Edited October 26, 2006 by GeddyRulz

[Slacker]

That's great GR. I've known him since i was a kid and i was friends with his daughter when we were teenagers, and he use to talk baseball when ever we were over his house. He still mad the Dogers left Brooklyn.