Different Slants

Seeing the World from a New Angle

I Can Be Alone in a City…by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Bewilderment,My Own Personal Hell — Bob at 8:30 am on Friday, January 18, 2019

by Robert M. Katzman © January 16, 2019

I can be alone in a city

A noisy busy city filled with people

Waves of people surging like an ocean

(Read on …)

Once Upon a Time: The Kindness of Strangers, long ago…by Robert M. Katzman

Here is an inspiring true story about the kindness of strangers. It is forgotten Chicago history, but not by me: 
When I was in my battle between my tiny independent magazine distribution company (1975-1980), against America’s largest distributor, as time went on I was becoming overwhelmed by the impossible odds.

I drove one truck and my wife, Joyce, drove the other one with our newborn son David (now 40, this week) sleeping in a cardboard box lined with soft blankets next to the step van’s vibrating stick-shift, helping me servicing 60 accounts. 

(Read on …)

Surviving Cancer, Fifty years Later…by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Bewilderment,Depression and Hope,Life & Death,My Own Personal Hell — Bob at 8:40 am on Thursday, December 20, 2018

by Robert M. Katzman © December 20, 2018

Fifty years ago, on December 20th, 1968, early in the morning when I was 18, I had cancer surgery on the left side of my face at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois. I was unaware of what my prospects were and what my surgeon, Dr. Danely Slaughter, had in mind to do. 

I awoke in the Intensive Care Unit, or the ICU, to discover that my head was bandaged like a soccer ball. When Dr. Slaughter came to visit me and explain why they removed my left jaw, he said he was 95% certain that they had caught all the cancer cells. Being me, I asked, very slowly, why not 100%? The doctor gruffly replied, “I think 95% is close enough”.

My father Israel was selling life insurance then, but told me, through his tears, that I would remain uninsurable for five years. To the insurance companies, he said, I was a bad risk, fifty years ago.

Two years later, in April 1970, Dr. Slaughter died of heart disease at the age of 58. I was 20 then, but turned 58 a decade ago. I think about him. Often.

(Read on …)

My Old Dog Max and The Interstate Incident…by Robert M. Katzman

(A Doggy Christmas Story)

December 24th 2018, by Robert M. Katzman

Readers, believe what you want to believe. But this happened on Sunday December 16, 2018, in Chicago, at about noon.                                                      

Max is not an attractive dog.

A year and a half after the death of my wife Joyce, and the three old dogs who progressively had to leave our home as her cancer spread, I decided that it was long enough for me to live in a silent house in Wisconsin. A dog out there might agree with me, but which dog?

After visiting many shelters in Kenosha and beyond, and not connecting with any dog I saw, I went searching further afield in the Lonely Dog Metropolis of The Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society, at 510 South LaSalle Street.

Years ago, after being fired from a horrible job by a beastial boss who screamed obscenities into a phone when leaving messages for his quivering employees into their voicemail, and he soon discovered I was no good at all at quivering, I decided I may not be able to change my own luck, but perhaps I could change the fate of a soulful dog waiting for me there at the CACS, a couple of blocks away. 

I hunted around for a while in my silent misery; saw a smallish black dog with a white chest about Beagle size, but a mutt. 

(Read on …)

Bookstore Stories (2) Entrepreneurs are born that way, even after two grim November 17ths…by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Gritty Katzman Chicago Stories,My Own Personal Hell,Retail Purgatory — Bob at 12:45 pm on Saturday, November 17, 2018
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November 17th? Here is my definition of being an Entrepreneur: On Nov 17, 1985, seven weeks after my first attempt to go into the back-issue magazine business-then common in the United States, now three decades later, almost extinct–two months after Bob’s Newsstand in Hyde Park closed after 20 years, the space I rented on Lasalle & Kinzie Streets in Downtown Chicago went up in flames, leading to 2 years of unemployment. Thousands of ancient periodicals collected by me over the decades going back to the Thirties, gone forever.

(Read on …)

Atonement…Judaism Distilled…by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Bewilderment,Jewish Themes,Life & Death,My Own Personal Hell,Philosophy — Bob at 3:03 pm on Monday, September 17, 2018

Atonement: Judaism Distilledby Robert M. Katzman © October 1, 2012

This brief speculation, below, about meaning in poetic form was derived from a much more detailed and complicated original true story about my now deceased wife Joyce, grand-daughter Emjay and myself in Ottawa, Illinois ending up involving the Ottowa Police department. I somehow realized there was a poem within it, and decided to separate it.

Atonement Among The Christians 

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Choosing to be in a small town in Central Illinois, over praying for forgiveness for my sins in a Chicago Synagogue on Yom Kippur–the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, is no simple decision

God, may be watching. Possibly, not approving. The risk could be fatal. But then, who knows?

When a person belongs to a group of people whose tiny numbers–less than 2/10ths of 1% of Earth’s entire population of seven billion or so, why worry about God noticing you no matter what you do?

(Read on …)

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