Different Slants

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 an 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 moving. 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.

(Read on …)

Joy’s Last Day

Joyce is gradually moving on now

To wherever we go when

That time comes for us

(Read on …)

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.

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(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.

(Read on …)

by Robert M. Katzman / Copyright July 31, 2016

Forward

Written under a hot July sun while sitting alone on a bench in Chicago’s Hyde Park landmark, The Point, a rocky stepped-stone park projecting into Lake Michigan. A long favorite place for swimmers, sunbathers and photographers located about two miles east of the world famous (and still standing) University of Chicago (1890-  ), and also about one mile east of the once slightly famous (and now non-existent) Bob’s Newsstand (1965-1985).

I was there waiting to meet an unknown number of much younger people who might possibly recognize a much older me as the guy who sold them lots of candy, and who might assume I still remember them as my customers when they were fourteen and went to Kenwood High School across the street from my first wooden and later brick newsstand, over thirty years ago. Both situations seemed unlikely and as a result encouraged me to finally write down the following poem I’d been carrying around in my head and heart for months.

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Copyright July 6, 2016

There is a fluidity and capriciousness to time and events.

There is no way to predict what will occur next based on what has happened before. Even a series of good events, one following another, doesn’t mean that kind of luck will continue, or the reverse, either. There is no pattern, no rationalization or balance as to why things happen in a person’s life. Why do I write this?

Last September, during a street fair in Racine, Wisconsin, a smallish town of less than 80,000 located next to Lake Michigan, just north of Kenosha, 30 miles south of Milwaukee and about 27 miles north of the Illinois border, my wife Joy and I met a very nice local couple named Brad and Rose Bliss.

In this nine months later follow-up story to what happened in that story, just about every single significant thing changed. No, none of us is or was famous and no one would have read about any of us in some newspaper; but what happened then caused our paths to cross during that street fair, and subsequently made a friendship bloom between two new settlers in Racine and a long established couple.

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