I planted a tree today.
The grayish-bluesy sky was gloomy, threatening to rain, and I was standing in my garden thinking:
“Good”.
 Some days drag themselves like there are elephants hanging onto each hour. I had no plans, no list of anything to do, no calls to make. I thought,
“Bob, plant a tree”.
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.
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.
Why is today different from all other days? Because on April 20, 1889 Adolph Hitler was born in Austria. Growing up Jewish on the South Side of Chicago, I learned this date when I was very young, perhaps seven. History matters when you belong to a people whom other people hunt to kill.
But maybe that was because ten days after that date on April 30, 1945, he killed himself in an underground bunker as the American and their allied armies were swiftly closing in on Berlin from the West, and the Russians were closing in on Berlin from the East. And exactly five years later, I was born on 59th and Cottage on April 30, 1950.
As a wary Jewish child, uncertain about who might hate me next, sometimes I used to say to myself:
“Good. I replaced him”. Meaning to me, I erased the evil man. Children can create essential fantasies.
With such somber history imprinted on me so young, it fostered a fascination with history throughout my life. Who did what to whom; why; when; how come this army defeated that army; why do people kill over religion; land; water; women; why do some people think they are superior to other people; and one day I thought to myself:
If a tiny black Pygmy from Central Africa could give a blood transfusion to a tall blond Swede thousands of miles north of them in order to save their life, well, we must all be the same. We look different, but we are all the same. It’s so simple.
That revelation hit me at about ten, and I found prejudice to be ridiculous. Which means my children and grandchildren also grew up with no prejudice. What is taught works both ways, depending on what a person feels is essential to creating a welcoming world, or a world with walls and barbed wired to keep out the “lesser people”. Evil can outlive you just as easily as kindness. I choose to give a person a chance.
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 …)