A Fantasy Ad Seeking a New Woman to Love
By Robert M. Katzman © July 20, 2017
It would start like this:
One Hundred Panes of Glass
She never saw my surprise for her
Something I designed to enchant
Her whimsical soul
My timing was off by a week
Her surprise gift arrived too late
And now, well…
She’s somewhere in Eternity
By Robert M. Katzman, Copyright June 11, 2017:
This is a kind of a melancholy story, honestly, but not what you might be thinking.
What follows is a true but and unknown Bonnie/Joyce story, in which the villain, I truly regret…was me.
My beautiful older sister, Bonnie Sue, who, as she endlessly instructed me,was 2 years, 6 months and 8 days older than me, and who died today in 2010 at 62. Since she was born in the same year as Israel, when Bonnie turned 13, so did Israel-a unique country/human Bar Mitzvah–whose government issued a large special framed document to any boy or girl who requested it. Bonnie’s hung on the wall above her bed. It was in Hebrew, in full color and to those of us who understood the historical sequence of events, deeply movie. Even I at eleven years understood that.
Their lives shall not be forgotten while I still breathe. Their names kept alive. Bonnie and Joyce mattered to many people.
This is not a story about sex, or passion, or violence, or triumph and vindication.
It’s not a story about bravery, or adversity—well, maybe adversity, but not like
being trapped on Mount Everest in a howling blizzard.
It’s just a little story about a sweet moment, frozen in the amber of my memory.
A fleeting act of kindness and self-discovery, in 1964.
Katherine Evans was a classmate of mine in grammar school for a number of
years, beginning, maybe, in second grade until eighth grade and graduation.
We weren’t friends. I didn’t know her. I didn’t know her family or anything
about her.
On Sunday, March 26th, 2017 Joy and I married in a formal Jewish ceremony for the first time among very close friends and relatives from many places and who arrived there on short notice.
The place, a beautiful and very large home was offered to us to do this by a lifelong friend of Joy’s, our Rabbi demonstrated the real meaning of tzedakah and made everything we hoped to achieve that day possible and people who came there last night had in many cases never met each other before. Our friends don’t frequently meet our families, or much of them. Not this time.
The many small children there who were sometimes strangers to each other immediately became a miniature mob tearing around the big house. If you think about that, it is amazing how fast that happened. I guess you have to grow up to become hesitant about getting to know someone. Very cool, children.
Our four adult children, Lisa, David, Rachel and Sarah, worked together and constantly, without instructions or supervision to make the day be all they wanted it to be for a woman they treasure. A gift in and of itself.
If warm feelings were gold, Fort Knox would have been a nugget compared to what we felt among all of them.
(Originally posted on July 21, 2008, then reposted March 10, 2017 in frustration after the 2016 election, where insanity began to rule what was once a last best refuge for people seeking a chance to live, to be happy)
To me, being an American is an idea.
A concept.
An agreement of equals.
A willingness to tolerate the differences in others.
A celebration of the beauty of cultural diversity.
While maybe originally, ours was a government,
“Of the Protestants, By the Protestants and For the Protestants”
We’re bigger than that today. A numerically insignificant People like my own family, Jews, now represent less than 2% of the total American population, but I believe that our Constitution includes me when I read it. I don’t live in fear, here.
Soon, there will be more Moslems in America than Jews, but I don’t care. They came here to escape the same killing chaos that brought my family here, as well as looking for a new start and a fair chance to become successful. I welcome them. Besides, when the hating is missing, they may remember that we’re linguistic cousins who speak two versions of the same Semitic language, as do the Assyrians, who are Christian Arabs.
On the Impossibility of Hope
By Robert M. Katzman © January 4, 2016
Sometimes nothing works out
You live your life
Hope for friends
Hope to be healthy
Hope to be happy
And
(a really big hope)
Try to fall in love
With someone as they are
And
Be loved as you are
You, without disguises
You, sometimes without a clue
You, with no idea where you are going
You, more than a little
Shy of visionary
You, without the certainty
Of
Knowing what to offer