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A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill

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Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life is both a personal memoir and a portrait of a time and place. Growing up in an Irish immigrant family in 1930s Brooklyn, Hamill captures the texture of daily life in a city shaped by hardship, resilience, and community. The book moves beyond the story of one man’s struggle with alcohol to offer a wider glimpse of American urban life across the Depression, wartime, and postwar years. What makes the memoir so compelling is Hamill’s candor. He recounts choices and episodes he is not proud of with a reporter’s clarity, never dressing them up but never excusing them either. That unflinching honesty makes his eventual break with alcohol feel earned rather than dramatized, an epiphany grounded in the rhythms of real life. The prose is straightforward yet evocative, drawing the reader into both the intimate details of Hamill’s coming-of-age and the broader sweep of history. In the end, A Drinking Life is not only the story of one man’s reckoning but also a reminde...
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I Still Love America. That's Why I'm Writing This: what I've seen from afar, and why I haven't stopped caring

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(photo taken on my trip to NY, May 2022) The most stunning book I’ve read in a long time is the one I’m reading now: Defying Hitler , a memoir by Sebastian Haffner. He was born in Germany in 1907, and the book—written in 1939 but unpublished until 2000—covers the years from his birth through 1933, just as Hitler came to power. It traces the rise of Nazism in Germany from the perspective of an ordinary German, offering a rare and immediate eyewitness account. Haffner wasn’t a politician or a historian; he was simply someone who paid attention. And as I read, I can’t help but draw parallels between the rise of fascism in Germany and the political events in the U.S. I find myself checking off boxes. Yes, that’s already happened. Yes, that too. I want to go back and build a timeline, to place the events Haffner describes alongside what has unfolded in the United States over the past decade. This isn’t a subject I usually write about, but I feel compelled, not just to share my thoughts, bu...
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A 57th Birthday

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(first published, July 20, 2019) The woman, holding a guitar and wearing a long flowing skirt, dolled up with flowers in her hair and a big smile, approaches the man holding the Percheron, a large draft horse. "¿Okay? Está bien? Is this okay?" she asks. She'd made the arrangement the previous week and so she was there to keep her promise to herself and to the man holding the horse. It was her 57th birthday, and the first one since her dad had passed, two months ago.   At first she told herself that she wouldn't celebrate it, that she was too sad, that she was in mourning. But then she thought, "What would Dad want me to do?" And she knew the answer: to enjoy life and to live it to the fullest. So then she thought, "What's the most outrageous thing I could do on my birthday?" And this is what she decided: to get dressed up, go into town with her guitar, and have her photo taken with the guitar while riding the Percheron. At this time in her life...
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Taking the Plunge at Sixty-Three

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  When I read about how Annie Edson Taylor had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel on her 63rd birthday, I felt a flash of recognition. Like Annie, I’ve been marking my birthdays with some kind of personal challenge. In her case, she took her leap into the roaring unknown in 1901, trying to secure fame and a financial future for herself. At sixty-three, I too am going to leap. I started this practice a few years back. One year, it was a photo shoot: me in a long black dress, holding my guitar on top of a massive draft horse. It was just two months after my dad died. It was a challenge because I had considered not celebrating my birthday at all—but then I realized that my dad would have wanted me to. So I did it in his honor. The morning of my birthday, I got dressed up, walked into town, made that image, and celebrated with a shot of tequila reposado afterwards (and then I had to rush off to perform in the restaurant). I didn’t know it then, but that would be the last year I playe...
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Outside the Boom

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San Miguel de Allende has a way of reinventing itself every few years—new faces, new accents, new construction projects. According to the Mexico Relocation Guide website, the current population of San Miguel de Allende is about 66,000 in the city proper, and about 10% of those are expats from Canada or the USA. During the various cycles of the housing boom here, it seems like everyone is either buying a house, building a house, or selling a house, to the point that one of the nicknames for the town is  “San Miguel se vende”  (San Miguel for sale). When we arrived here twenty years ago, the town was in one of the "up" cycles of the boom. My partner and I were trying to figure out the local scene, get to know it, and find a way to make a living down here playing music. One of our first forays into the scene was an art opening at the newly repurposed Fábrica La Aurora. Before that, it was a textile factory, employing thousands of people in town from 1902 until its closure in 199...
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The Flowers of Yesterday, the Flowers of Today

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I’ve lived in a little rented house in a little neighborhood in a little town in the Central Highlands of Mexico for almost twenty years. Living in a neighborhood for such a long time has allowed me to watch our neighbors' daily habits and routines, and these routines form part of the rhythm of my life. And, living in one place for a long time, I watch the passing away of these people, these habits, these routines.   For example, the older couple, pictured above, are my neighbor's parents. (This neighbor is why I'm living in the house I've lived in for the past 17 years, the most stable and beautiful home I’ve ever lived in. More about that later.) In Mexico, intergenerational families are the norm, not the exception, and these folks live with their son and daughter-in-law next door. They sat on the doorstep of the family home every afternoon. From this spot, they could see all the way down the road.    Whenever she saw me going in or out of my front door, the lady woul...
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The Old Man and the Gringa (Me)

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The “gringa” had lived in the  colonia, or  neighborhood, of a small town in Mexico for over thirteen years, “gringa” being the local word for an American woman living in Mexico.  The old Mexican man with a limp reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin's “Tramp” lived in the neighborhood too, probably his whole life. The two passed each other many times walking down the hill, and every time the old man saw the woman, he said to her in English the one word that he apparently knew: “mo-nay.” Time after time, the same word, “mo-nay.” She grew annoyed with him, thinking, “Is that how he sees me? As only a source of money?” It isn't that she never gave to people in need—she did, often generously, whatever she could. It's just that his one word was so constant and such a habit that it really got on her nerves. Not wanting to encourage him, she either ignored him or said,  “No, no tengo nada ahorita.”  “I don’t have anything right now.” And walked on quickly. This went on litera...
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