Category Archives: lost

The New York Times has this blog on drinking. It tends to make me cry. I like that it provides a variety of perspectives. This week’s entry is about the camaraderie of young teachers in Brooklyn going out for drinks after work. That reminds me of my dear friends and the many many happy hours that got us through the infinite frustrations of the innercity bureaucracy, the endless needs of the public, the hours of customer service to the broadest range of humans. And the times we failed, just didn’t get it right. I have never felt the “need” of a drink more than in Leadership training around ten in the morning. And that was why I left.

but I miss it still.

There were so many forces at work in happy hour. Support, escape, discussion, liquid xanax, team building, love and true friendship. But for some of us, after a while, it became clear that happy hour was not optional. We needed it. We needed our friends to need it, or we would find new friends that did.

There were more than a few hungover storyhours across the borough. I once had to call an employee and wake her up to tell her she was supposed to be at a high school representing the library an hour ago. She was lucky, I think now, that we noticed and sat her down and talked with her, instead of ignoring it. No one sat me down and talked to me…

Part of me wants nothing more than to go back. I miss my friends and the reliability of our terrible dive of a neighborhood bar under the BQE where my dog was allowed the run of the place. Months after I stopped going, I saw the bartender in the neighborhood and he asked me where I’d been, which is no small thing in the big city.

It’s a loss. It’s a loss. Once you feel something you can’t unfeel it, and once I noticed how happy hour was holding me back from happiness, I couldn’t enjoy it. But it was such a valuable shining release for me for those years, that I can’t quite let go. If I was just a slightly different person, I think, I could go back and be happy.

Will anything better than those evenings’ warmth and profound sense of belonging and friendship and understanding present itself in my new life?

HEYL–Lawrence, Jr. (b. October 1919), co-founder of the Princeton Hot Club, and longtime resident of Nyack, NY, died on May 5, after a long illness. The only child of Bertha and Lawrence Heyl (Associate Librarian at Princeton University), Larry was a graduate of Princeton Country Day, Lawrenceville, and Princeton (class of 1940). He joined the 9th Division of the Army in January 1941, landing at Normandy on June 12, 1944, following training in England, where he met a British private, Jean, at a dance in Winchester. They married four years later in NYC, while he was Associate Editor of Theatre Arts. Larry was a skilled photographer in the style of Cartier-Bresson, capturing the lives, in black and white, of his family, friends and Rockland County artists. He served on the boards of the Rockland Foundation and Edward Hopper House, and edited Nyack in Black & White (2005). Larry spent most of his career in the oil industry, first at Texaco and API, and then at Mobil, heading Investor Relations. A foe of artifice, prejudice, solecisms, superstition, and poor lighting, Larry is deeply missed by Jean, his wife of 60 years (now of Kendal in Sleepy Hollow), his two surviving children, Margery Heyl (director of Nonotuck Community School in Northampton, MA.) and Dorothy Heyl (a lawyer at Milbank Tweed) and their husbands, and his five grandchildren, Julie and Molly Heyl-Rushmer, Regina Heyl DePietro, and Emily and Gregory Nichols (children of Catherine Heyl, d. 1998). In lieu of flowers, contributions in his name may be given to Kendal on Hudson (for the healing garden) in Sleepy Hollow, NY 10591 c/o Executive Director.
Published in the New York Times on 5/7/2008.