Different Slants

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© January 5, 2014

Letter to a faraway friend:

I’ve been snowbound for three days now and thinking about how muted life can be when you stay home all day. Been cooking a lot, we have ample supplies and going to restaurants without any income seems irrational. My cooking is getting very good. Since I have a very limited choice of what to eat because of my  numerous and confusing allergies, finding interesting ways to vary what is on the approved list makes it intellectually challenging as well.

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Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

By Robert M. Katzman © February 1, 2013

 

At Dead Man’s Curve

My hot rod swerved

All eighteen wheels sliding

But I twern’t afear’d

That rod was carved from a Model T

Kissed by Henry Ford

An’ afore that, a covered wagon

Racing west through the plains

Flaming arrows piercing the air

My pretty blonde grandma

Screaming and pumpin’ her Winchester

Because damn country people can!

We can hunt bear with an ax

An’ eagles with spears

An’ fish with a machine gun

Damn trout’ll never know what hit ‘em!

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Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

© June 26, 2012

This is a curious story about control, written at a time in America when few of us have control over anything. But also defiance, self-determination, art, science, isolation and confrontation.  When I was nine years old.

It is also about killing wasps. The kind of wasps with six legs, not that other kind. Why would anyone think that?

The time of this story is summer, 1959. The place, southern Wisconsin.

I was nine years old. I was not afraid of flying stinging wasps. And that made all the difference.

When I was nine, my parents packed me off to an overnight camp for the first time ever.  For two months. Maybe they thought I’d wander off in the woods and get eaten by something bigger than me. Most things were bigger than me. But I don’t think any experienced bear would find my skinny little body worth the trouble.

I was sick all the time from whatever weeds grew in the rural part of southern Wisconsin. There were no drugs in 1959. I want to think enduring the ragweed misery helped build my character, but there’s no evidence of that.

I didn’t want to be at that large camp with its mob of screaming children racing around and its tall athletic counselors who told us what to do, every-single-minute-of-the-day. Like my grammar school but worse. Around the clock supervision.

Two months to a nine-year-old was an eternity and just like that famous book about lethal children by William Golding, Lord of the Flies, published five years earlier, some situations bring out unexpected aspects of children’s personalities, like savagery or other characteristics. He was right.

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© May 20, 2012

In 1984, late Fall in Evanston, Illinois I was trying to figure out Chanukah.

What could I do about Chanukah?

My nearly twenty-year-old Chicago international magazine store, Bob’s Newsstand, was ten months from closing.  I had no income and no way to buy presents to celebrate the two thousand year old, eight-day Jewish holiday, the “Festival of Lights” for my three children. Lisa was nine, David was six and Rachel was four.

I was thirty-four and less than a year from my mid-life crisis and two years of unemployment.  No one wanted to hire the formerly self-employed guy.  They say we never stay.

What could I do that would charm them?

Sitting in my garage which used to be a barn one hundred years earlier, when the historic house was built in 1882, and which was then converted into two apartments, or coach houses as Evanston called them, now empty and perched above me, I sat among my numerous woodworking tools in the dim light of dusk.

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