Different Slants

August 16, 2020 © by Robert M. Katzman

(Originally written 11/18, this revised story has new meaning to me with the possible election of a President with Irish ancestry and his VP with immigrant parents from East India, Jamaica and with a Jewish husband, to boot. Only in America could this happen, yet still, the hate persists. This true story relates how I handled hate when it came to visit me, 30 years ago. May healing and understanding occur in America if they are elected.)

by Robert M. Katzman © Sunday, December 22, 2019 (Revised 12/26/22…This may continue)

Written in response to Peggy’s letter of pain on Facebook: No, Peggy, I don’t know you, but I felt compelled to respond. Perhaps it will give you some possible way to cope and find peace.

I have not lost a child, but seem blessed or cursed with empathy, with absorbing others’ pain so intensely, it is like having a massive unpredictable Empath Serpent coiled within me, sometimes rearing up and piercing my heart with its fangs. I have no shield to stop me from caring.

I am Jewish without excuses, not into endless ritual, but deeply spiritual, and now old enough to have experienced the loss of so many people that I have forgotten some of their names.

(Read on …)

By Robert M. Katzman  ©  Halloween 2011

What follows is the quintessential Chicago story of hardship and friendship. It all happened on the South Side, and my story covers decades. Why not dive in and get lost for a while? Every so often, as present civilization seems to be crashing down around us, and civility with it, good happens.

Why this is always a surprise mystifies me, but just as there’s more darkness in the Universe than light, perhaps that out-of-whack ratio is mirrored here on Earth with evil overwhelming good.  I don’t want to believe that is true.  I have evidence to the contrary that spontaneous good both exists in the most modest of people, and that it is either an inherited trait, or a mutation.  

Though my story was written on Halloween, it is more goodhearted than all the witches and goblins who surface that day, and is much more of a Thanksgiving Day story, at least to me.  Let me introduce the cast of this absolutely true little drama, which begins in frigid winter, 1967 and ends in sunny June 2011, forty-four years later.

By Robert M. Katzman Sunday, November 24, 2019

(Undated November 21, 2021)

About 35 years ago, when Joy and I were 36, Lisa was 10, David (now Konee) was 7 and Rachel was 5, a tradition was started within our little family. People don’t actually know when traditions start unless they linger through time like this one. This is that story: 

Once upon a time, in 1985 or so, I was on my second marriage with two young children. But when I was much younger and married to another very young and good person, we had a daughter, Lisa. After the 2nd marriage, on Thanksgiving Day, Lisa was home with her Mom and so she couldn’t be with her younger siblings or Joy and me, and it was sad for all of the five of us.

By Robert M. Katzman © June 10, 2019

Conceived in mid-July ’49

Born late in April of ’50

Been running hard ever since

Trying to catch up

Born into chaos and diamonds

I somehow chose chaos

And the strong

Sometimes brilliant

Individuals dwelling within it

***************

Rearranging my priorities

Disheveled by design

I never let clothes define the man

If people only perceived

My dog-eared cover

Then maybe they missed 

A very good book

*********************

By Robert M. Katzman © October 10, 2019

I believe that the central and very big idea of Yom Kippur, is essentially to ask for forgiveness as a community, all over the world, not only for one’s self. To atone collectively. 

Asking God to forgive another’s sin’s is an amazing concept if you think about it in reference to when these ideas were assembled–perhaps 3,000 years ago–when it was simply kill or be killed.