Crossing the Bridge

Reason for Being in the World, Ch. 9, Part II

Reason for Being in the World: Table & Chapters

Reason for Being in the World, Ch. 9

Sunk in my dread, I marched on along, up North Broadway, until I turned around and headed home. I crossed a different bridge over the river when I came to it.

Ch. 9, Part I

Crossing the Bridge

I came to the Spring Street Bridge, south of the Broadway overpass I had traversed into Lincoln Heights, and crossed it. I was walking through old industrial streets sometimes used in Hollywood shoots, heading back to Chinatown. New York had made me a walker, the Manhattan streets. You can’t not be. It is how you live in the city. The people, the storefronts, the buildings, the curbside attractions, traffic, towering heights of ambition, the striving, succeeding, and failing below, all the stories swirling in the maelstrom of every intersection.

Mac had been a walker before me. He wasn’t a hiker – maybe he was, in childhood, over the rough terrain of southwestern Ukraine, beyond the pious lanes of Orinin, stained with Jewish blood. But he loved to walk, miles at a time, anywhere he was but especiall…