Different Slants

Acts of Friendship: Mickey Remembers

by Robert M. Katzman © May 18, 2018

 I had dinner with a friend in Chicago last night at the kind of a classic guy’s dark wood steakhouse restaurant my Dad and I would go to on a special occasion. Except this was the 18th anniversary of his death in 2000 and in his memory, I had a great dinner with my old friend. He lived far south of Chicago and I live in southern Wisconsin, so this was a good central meeting place.

We talked about many old times, good and bad and the price Time can exact on a person and their relationships. One of the rare things as a person travels through life is to still have a person you can talk to about something that happened 40 years ago or more. That begins to change year by year when a person hits 68, which is what I am now. As my Dad used to say: “The circle gets smaller.”

After a couple of hours it was time to head out to our respective homes because it was a hike to get back, but still, worth sharing company with each other. You get what you give.

(Read on …)

Grief Hits Like a Brick: April 27, 1975

by Robert M. Katzman © April 27, 2018

Never knew when it would hit, how hard it would hit, or where.

Didn’t think it would be in my kitchen in Wisconsin on a sunny Friday morning, on the 43rd anniversary of when I met a beautiful young love I’ll never see again.

It is one thing to type that.

It is another thing to experience the totality of that slammed door all at once on the first anniversary of that endlessly shared day with her, without her.

Oh, she’s gone.

Forever.

And the pain of it unexpectedly just smashed into me with a suddenness that made me think I was going to break into pieces, very wet pieces. Tears poured through my fingers where I was holding my face, dripping on my greying beard, down my neck soaking my black T-shirt. And they kept flowing because there was no way to turn them off. Fifty weeks after Joy’s funeral, I’d figured whatever I was going to feel, I’d already felt.

Wrong.

(Read on …)

by Robert M. Katzman © April 9, 2018

I first posted this beginning part on Facebook on April 3, 2018. But what I wished and hoped for isn’t what happened. Read the older part first and my story will begin after that:

Ok, this is a little eerie. Well, everything I write about probably seems a little eerie. A little over a year ago, I bought a 1993 suburban car/van because it was big enough to carry my wife’s wheelchair, walker and other things she needed to go visit our children and our friends.

What once was a casual get-up-and-go on impulse to do something, morphed into a production of trying to get her out of the house, down the three steps and then into the van by putting a step down for her to use to move up. This woman was a gymnast at Thornton High School in 1967.

Whenever I became exasperated by having so much to do, I imagined what an insult this progressive decline of her body had become to her, and I kept quiet. We were in the last act of a tragedy, and we both knew it.

(Read on …)

Love from the Abyss

by Robert M. Katzman © February 14, 1988

Written for my love, my wife, in 1988, after ten years of marriage and after nearly three years of my unemployment, when deeply depressed I learned what happens to a guy who received twenty years of great publicity running a once famous Bob’s Newsstand, and then found out nobody would hire someone like me. They said, like a line of robots: “Well, you’ll leave as soon as you can to start over.”

One month later, I was hired to manage Europa Bookstore at 3229 N. Clark Street, in BoysTown, Chicago

Discovered among her papers last night, I wanted to give Joy a Valentine, and this is what I wrote for her thirty years ago, today. We were both 37. It rhymes, but so what? No other person has ever seen it.     We, our love, and the marriage survived:

Our balances are red

Your mood sometimes blue

After ten years of marriage

My Valentine to you

Never mind Valentine was Catholic

And I a wandering Jew

Today’s meant to be a ‘Day of the Heart

To give praise, or sometimes to rue’ (Read on …)

Paul, Beautiful Sue, Wayne, the Paperboy Failing Algebra & the

University of Chicago Lab High School (1966)

by Robert M. Katzman © January 30, 2018   Part One 

Classic gritty Chicago tale about a high school math tutor and a student from very different worlds leading to a fifty-year warm friendship, which only death could end.

In September 1964, after failing a pre-freshman admittance required Algebra course during the summer at the University of Chicago Laboratory School High School, or U-High, in Hyde Park, I also subsequently failed my first year taking Freshman Algebra, too.

Somewhere among my less treasured memories is an old shoebox, and within it, besides my four different draft card classifications between 1968 and 1974, is a small rectangular piece of paper with the handwritten letter “F” placed squarely in the center of it. It meant I had to take the detested algebra class for yet a third time.

U-High’s very efficient system for helping students who seemed likely to embarrass and undermine the school’s gleaming reputation in the future assigned me a math tutor who would meet with me in the library in a private room every Tuesday and Thursday. The first week of my second year there as a sophomore in September 1966, I met Paul Moulton. I was sixteen, born in 1950, and he was forty-six, born in 1920.

(Read on …)

Relationships Defined: A Reflection Closer to Reality

by Robert M. Katzman © New Year’s Eve, 2017

1) Friend: One of one, or one of many, a preferred person to call, go places with, share experiences, be with when sad or drunk, to defend or be defended by when threatened by words or worse and who when you ask for help, absolutely, positively, shows up.

(Read on …)