Different Slants

By Robert M. Katzman © February,13 2012  (almost) Valentine’s Day

313,000,000 people in the United States.

159,000,000 are women.

50.9%?

A minority?

Go figure.

Like there was an ovary lottery, the women won it and then the women lost everything else.

Mystifies me.  Maybe thousands of years ago, men had the armies and slaughtered each other, and then one day realized that women could make more people and the men became terrified.  No stopping them, the men must have realized, so…we better watch them closely.  Keep them under control. 

Eons later, the women still are.

Paid less than men, run a few national companies, have a small number of seats in the United States Congress, 93 out of 535 seats, or 17.4%.

Now that…is a minority.

Senators: (17 out of 100) – 12 Democrats and 5 Republicans

Representatives: (76 out of 435) — 48 Democrats and 28 Republicans  

So, 60 of the 93 women are Democrats, or almost 65% of the 17.4%, or 11% of the entire Congress. 

Numbers can be a lot of fun, especially to someone who failed algebra in June, 1965, not that I remember that poisonous moment or anything like that.  Or the teacher’s name: Miss Eason.  Or that I had to take it again.

My mother, Anne, would have been 91 today, the day before Valentine’s Day, which always annoyed her.

She was born in 1921, the year after women first were awarded the vote by Congress in 1920.  Given that she was born in Chicago under the steel umbrella of the Democratic Machine, it is likely my mother voted that year and every year after that in local elections—the straight Democratic ticket, of course—decades before she was legally permitted to do so in 1942.  In Chicago politics, this would be a fine point of contention.

(Read on …)

© February 2, 2012  (Groundhog Day) 

In the summer of ’58, my father told me to mow the lawn, front and back, at my house on 8616 S. Bennett, where  all the fruit trees were. We lived on the South Side of Chicago in a Jewish/Irish neighborhood.

My grandfather, Nathan, who came from Minsk, Belorussia in 1914, planted them. He loved trees and kept a small Lemon tree as a “pet” in his house.

I would visit him when I was a child and I was amazed by the heavy, fragrant, grapefruit-sized lemons that his pet tree produced. When he grew too old to keep living in his large house and had to leave the, by then, really large tree that managed to fill most of his basement, he cried bitterly.  His three middle-aged children, including my mother, were shocked by this.  I later overheard them whispering to each other that they thought “he loved that damn Lemon tree” more than he loved them.

Jealous of a tree.

A hard thing for me to understand.  Adults were strange.

I had already learned that I was severely allergic to newly cut grass, a situation so unbelievable at a time when Dwight Eisenhower was president of the United States and allergies were still not well understood,  that my telling my father a story like that was too ridiculous for him to take seriously.

I was also allergic to all the fresh fruit growing in the back yard, but that was never a subject leading to conflict. But my discovering, one by one: all the fruits, vegetables, pollens, animals, kinds of fabric and molds– exactly what I was unable to eat, or be near, was a nightmare.  It took years for me to learn them all.  And then, shockingly, that allergies can mutate. That something I could eat with no problem would one day become toxic to me. 

People who are blessed without allergies won’t understand any of this.  How could they?

Knowing what I knew about newly cut grass, however, gave me good reason to resist my father’s insistent instructions, and resist I did, leading to a loud and threatening argument. He lost his temper and I took off down the block to 85th St. and then west toward Caldwell School, my red-brick public grammar school.

 I could run like a son-of-a-bitch. My father couldn’t catch me.  I was certain of that.  In the summer of 1958 he was forty-five years old . That age was considered pretty old back then.

We both kept running.

After three blocks, I began to worry that he might suffer a heart attack because of how far we had run and I was very concerned about him, even at eight years old.  I had a real conflict going on within me.

(Read on …)

© January 22, 2012

To know a rabbit

Requires

Paying attention

to

Silence

I call

My rabbit:

Rabbit

To date

Rabbit

Has expressed

No other preference

When Rabbit is hungry

He looks at me

When Rabbit is frightened

He looks at me

When my Rabbit is happy to see me

He looks at me

Rabbit’s  

Opaque

Shining black eyes

Expect me to understand

The consequences

of my

Misunderstanding

are

Permanent

Dry Timothy grass

Leafy Romaine lettuce

Raw whole carrots

and

Curious little pellets

Make up

Rabbit’s buffet

I line

Rabbit’s cage

With

Recycled

New York Times

Pages

Hoping to raise our

Relationship

To a

Higher plain

But Rabbit’s

Response

Has been disturbing

(Read on …)

Mary and I spent the summer crossing Europe from west to east in a sailboat.  The trip took us through the rivers and canals of France, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania before leading us to the Black Sea.  Details of the trip (written for boaters) can be found on my Red Sky website.

After reaching the Black Sea we sailed along the coast through Romania and Bulgaria then through the Bosphorus to Istanbul, Turkey.  The first three days in Istanbul were spent going through the byzantine process of clearing in.  After that we had a couple of days to play tourist and just explore.

One day, while wandering the market streets on the Asian side of the city I spotted a barber shop.  I have begun a tradition of never having two consecutive haircuts in the same country.

A market street in Istanbul

I had not had a haircut since Germany.  I also had not had a shower since Bulgaria – so I was neither looking nor smelling my best. (Read on …)

© January 13,  2012

I never received an allowance as a child. I always had to earn it myself. So, I was motivated.

At age five, I dragged a red wagon behind me, walking about half a mile to a vacant lot across from a high school where I discovered there were seemingly endless empty pop bottles thrown there by the students which I could collect and deliver to my nearby drugstore for instant cash, at two to five cents per bottle. Many of the bottles were broken and it was risky to go after the good ones, but I felt the reward was worth the risk. Evidently, no other kid did.  I had the bottle harvesting market to myself, in 1955.    Learned, at five years old, that there is money to be made almost everywhere if you are astute and can evaluate the risk, reasonably.

I also taught myself carpentry at age five, being the grandson of an immigrant carpenter, and built a tree house in my backyard.  Later, an actual boat.  I had a large collection of tools and was well versed in using them.  Two years ago, at age fifty-nine, when I reopened my collectible periodical business with no funding whatsoever, I built all 700 running feet of shelving by myself.  It took me seven weeks, always working alone. You never know what skill you learned long ago that will save the day some future time when you have no other options open to you.

At age twelve, in the winter of 1962, I went from door to door asking homeowners to pay me to shovel their snow-covered walks.  It took me three houses to establish the going rate, which I didn’t know when I started out, and that older women were far more likely willing to pay for my services than older men.  I learned that gender really matters when I wanted to sell something.

At age thirteen to fourteen, I was dating a cute girl from down the block whose father, I discovered, worked for Whitman Publishing Company in Wisconsin.  They produced the well known “Red” and “Blue” books which were widely respected by coin collectors to establish the wholesale and retail price of coins.  They also made the blue folding coin collecting boards that actually held the particular coins found in chronological order, with the missing dates printed below each spot to tell the collector what to look for. 

I bought all three items wholesale from my girlfriend’s dad, who was very amused that I thought I could actually run a business while still in seventh grade.  I felt I could sell the books to my classmates when coin collecting was becoming a mania in America because of the newly minted Kennedy half-dollar, after he was assassinated the year before.  Then, gradually, I became a coin dealer myself, to supply my customers with a reason to buy my coin folders and books.  I subscribed to two adult coin newspapers and educated myself about the history of coinage, and what was worth how much, and why.  Also I learned about grading.

As I began supplying more and more students with coins and supplies, my own collection began growing.  When the boys lost interest in collecting, I bought their collections at wholesale prices, sometimes less than that because it was a buyer’s market in grammar school. 

(Read on …)

I wait for you

I wait for you

Crushed by my anticipation

I wait for you

Playing with pink packages of fake sugar

Ignoring Today’s Special

Searching the streets…for you

Searching for the ways your flowing hair sways

The indulgent tilt of your head

The coldness in your eyes

Your unapologetic walk

I endure forgettable music

Bitter aroma of burnt coffee

From unwatched pots

Wafting through stale air

While I wait for you

The worn waitress

Peers over her glasses at me

Wondering:

“Will he ever order?”

(Read on …)