The Centuries Pass: An Experiment in Intellectual and Spiritual Accounting

Welträson: Reason for Being in the World, Part 3

The Old Shul, Orynyn, Ukraine (“It was so-called because no one among the living knew when and by whom the shul was built.’”

Parts 1-2

Welträson: Reason for Being in the World

Become from: An Experiment in Intellectual and Spiritual Accounting

We were all living in the same city for the first time in twenty years. Over almost that many years, Jeff, followed by Sharyn and me, and finally our parents, ages 82 and 77, had moved to Los Angeles from our roots in New York City. It had been eighteen years since the heart attack that nearly killed Mac.

I had gone to see him in Rockaway’s Peninsula General Hospital for the first time as soon as I was permitted, two days afterwards. He looked terribly weak. It was the same hospital where five years earlier Dad had witnessed me strapped to a stretcher and soaked in my own sweat and urine from my life-altering freak out on LSD – the sight he later told me took ten years from his life and produced the only tears I ever saw on his face. I had responded to my mother’s summons from my first apartment, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was a small studio, for …