I spent the years 1988-1994 in bed.
No, I wasn’t having sex most of that time. Nor was I studying Torah. I was sick. I was so sick, I was so devastated by headaches, I couldn’t even listen to music, let alone talk radio or TV (with the exception of about an hour a day).
I was bedridden by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. (Out of everything I’ve tried for CFS, I’ve found acupuncture most effective.)
From age 22 to 27, my life was hell.
I felt deeply alone.
I tried to stay in touch with my friends my own age and almost all of them wanted to move on with their own lives and leave me alone.
By contrast, almost all the people I knew in the second half of life were kind to me (particularly my parents, Dennis Prager and Rabbi Yitzhock Adlerstein).
During my illness, I converted to Judaism. I think this particularly unsettled friends my own age (none of them Jewish). It gave them another opportunity to dismiss me as a weirdo.
Over the past 14 years, I’ve made a lot of attempts to stay in touch with friends from childhood. Few have shown any interest in staying in touch with me.
Last month, I went to Loma Linda University for the weekend. I saw a lot of childhood friends, some I hadn’t seen in ten, twenty and tweny eight years.
It was glorious to reunite with them. It felt like I we were picking up from where we were decades ago.
Following my visit to Loma Linda, I followed up with phone calls and emails to my old friends. With the exception of my seventh grade buddy Gary, none of them have stayed in touch. All those plans to get together have counted for nought.
I don’t want to keep trying.
This hurts.
What if I need to get together with someone to hate on Jews, who will I turn to? Amalek? He’s but a figment of my imagination.
