The Home Away From Home Bar: O'Hanlon's

New York City is full of bars. Hip bars. Beer bars. Wine bars. Pubs, dives, jukebox sweet music bars. At a point in everyone's drinking life, there is always a bar you go to that's your home away from home. Sometimes, in a city where homes often change, that bar changes, but some bars are special enough to occupy a space in our drinking hearts. That bar for me is O'Hanlon's.

O'Hanlon's was never my original bar -- that title belongs to my dear, close drinking friend Ace. I've been drinking with Ace for several years now and O'Hanlon's was her home away from home bar. And because it was her home, it became my home as well. It's the type of bar where everyone knows your name, and if there's a special song that goes with your name, you go there often enough, they'll play it for you (Ace is one of those people.) For a long time, this was our steady bar, Ace 's and mine. For a time, it was also the "birthday bar", the place where we threw our respective bashes to celebrate a each new year of our lives. For a time, it was a bar where I moved on from the Long Island Ice Tea to more sophisticated drinking tastes.

Then I moved away, didn't go to O'Hanlon's for years. Ace and I stopped going out to drink that much, though she remained a happy regular at O'Hanlon's. But recently, I started going back there, having drinks there and it reminded me what a great place it was. I felt nostalgic after my second drink at the bar, I got my third drink as a buy back. I hadn't had a true buy back for years. This past Tuesday, I sat with Ace and her friend Chris while they reminisced on their great times there. And I started remembering all my good times there too -- Ace and I even ran into John, an old O'Hanlon's regular who introduced me to Van Morrison's Too Late to Stop Now and insisted how the only way to listen to Van the Man was on vinyl. I remembered how when Ace and I would drink there, often, O'Hanlon's regulars like John would buy our drinks for us, just out of the sheer goodness of their drinking hearts.

I realized that though it's a bar that's only my home away from home now like a second cousin -- the home being more others than mine, this bar was my home away from home for awhile. And then you got good memories every time you step into a place, it'll never really stop being a home.