My 68th Halloween. Trick or Treat?
by Robert M. Katzman © October 31, 2018
Well, of course, Trick
What did you expect?
The Trick for me is, this far gone
Is to remember what the Treats were
As life gradually unfolded
1964: A Runaway’s Renaissance
by Robert M. Katzman © September 9, 2018
Fifty-four years ago on June 8th, 1964 I ran away from a dangerous violently abusive home. I was fourteen and two weeks away from graduating Caldwell grammar school on the South Side, about a dozen miles south of State and Madison, Chicago’s Downtown.
My story is filled with Ghosts, but it is worth writing down, if only to soothe the Ghosts’ anxiety.
After all, aren’t I part of a world-wide Tribe so often called: The People of The Book?
Who am I to resist that Celestial Design?
It is now long past “What will become of this wild child?”
Now near seventy, I must write, “This is what really happened.”
Wildflower Diary (2)
by Robert M. Katzman © June 23, 2018
 Short essays, reflections & captured moments about prairies, plants, food and people worth writing about, at various times:
 July 30, 2017
My original essay, posted separately:
Wildflower Diary: Caring For Joy’s Gardenâ€
https://www.differentslants.com/?p=3550
 March 6, 2018
 Ok, this is my grandfather, South Side Jacob the Carpenter’s quick recipe for tiny seasoned red potatoes with cheddar cheese. He was from Byelorussia, born in 1882, so ya gotta take that into consideration. He used unusual tools to achieve his aims.
Here it is:
So, you roast the red potatoes on a metal tray for about 4 minutes in an oven, broiling them at 450. Then take them out, go look in your closet for a steel hammer with good balance to it. Wash off the serious part of the hammer, then beat the hell out of them little potatoes (with the skin still on) until they are totally defeated. Kinda like what happened at the 1968 Democratic Convention. But, I digress.
Shattered Hero: Just One Punch, But 30 Years Later, Mickey Remembered
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.
by Robert M. Katzman © April 13, 2018
On April 13, 1963, near the top of Pill Hill on the South Side of Chicago at a very large, very square synagogue named Rodfei Sholem or Chodesh on 91st and Jeffery Avenue, I was still 12 years old and it was my Bar Mitzvah. But that Temple was so packed with members, that it had to schedule two Bar Mitzvahs at one time.
Many of the Hebrew School teachers were high-strung Israelis, only 15 years after the new country was formed, and they screamed at me all the time. This Bar Mitzvah, this singularly longed for day represented parole for me from my resented ethnic prison. I was free. I was done.
It took me four more years, on my own running a newsstand in Hyde Park by then, to figure out I really did completely accept my Jewish identity at 17, in 1967 and my personal life long self-education began that year and continues today, half a century later at almost 68.
99% of everyone who was at my Bar Mitzvah party are dead now. It is a lonely time to recall any of it, but I do remember the crowds. Now no one left to call and say: Do you remember…?
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 our 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 …)