Different Slants

by Robert M. Katzman © May 20, 2019

Learning to work with your hands changes your worldview and increases your ability to take care of yourself and be more independent. It also helps make a person more compassionate to other people’s physical limitations, because so many are one injury away from unemployment. Working with handtools builds muscles, focuses attention and keeps aging people stronger.

To me, judging another’s worth by what they do for a living is a sin. But then, my running a wooden newspaper stand outside as a shivering teenager in winter to allow me to pay for high school with privileged classmates, creates feelings like that in a person. Seven of my 160 classmates ended up working for me, at one time, or another. 

My 68^th 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

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By Robert M. Katzman © July 18, 2018:

“I’m Fourteen. I Need a Job”

At Midnight, June 8^th, 1964, I escaped an insane home on the South Side of Chicago where beatings with thick leather belts, belt buckles, rubber hoses and clenched fists were an everyday event. I left running with only the clothes on my back, in freezing rain, two weeks before graduating eighth grade at Caldwell School.

Met up at some point with my father who took me to live with him in a one-room studio with a small kitchen and bathroom in Hyde Park, across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry. I was going to need the industry part. He wasn’t working. This is what happened next when I was essentially on my own.

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When I was very young on the South Side of Chicago, my Mother, a daughter of immigrants from the Jewish Pale area of Eastern Europe where Jews were forced to live by the Czar, was addicted to this drink called a “chocolate phosphate”.

She ordered this delicacy in Jewish restaurants which was essentially ice cubes, chocolate syrup and carbonated seltzer water. The basic point, she explained to me, was to make her “greptz” or belch after a heavy meal.

Decades later when I began going to New York City in 1980 for book conventions, I naturally assumed this common Chicago beverage would be available anywhere in a city with the largest Jewish population in America. But no one heard of it, didn’t know what I was asking for and quickly conveyed the impatience and rudeness that NYC was also famous for.  (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.

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