Different Slants

By Robert M. Katzman © September 12, 2015  

(Revised: Memorial Day May 31, 2021)

My Father fought the Japanese

Born before the Navahos were citizens

Born before women could vote

Before Hirohito, Yamamoto and Tojo

Before Meir, Dayan and Herzl

Before Eisenhower, Patton and FDR

Were names on anyone’s lips

*

Packed into trains of troop ships

Crossing the Pacific Ocean

To avenge Pearl Harbor treachery

To kill people he didn’t know

Bombed sending messages by telegraph

He died with steel shrapnel

Still in his body

Half a century later

(Read on …)

© April 10, 2014 (updated in December 2018)

I learned all you’ll read below from an old man I met in 1965, Bill, when I was 15, born in 1950 and he was 69, born in 1896.  For my grandkids, and yours, listen to his words from over 50 years ago. He lived what I wrote here, and eventually, I did too:

Hard to know all this
When you’re a kid
I was a kid
I didn’t know enough
Didn’t have much choice
Bad times are thrust upon you
Not like choosing a college

***

Bad times can toughen you
Inside and out
Turn your gut from cotton to leather
If you keep your eyes open
Mouth shut
Listen
And don’t make stupid choices

(Read on …)

Robert M Katzman

Updated twelve years later in December 2019. I was 57 when I started writing this blog. Now I’m 69, have a grey beard, and five grandchildren. However, I still like the picture below from when I was 55, taken by my gorgeous wife, Joyce. On May 14th, 2017, I lost Joyce to cancer after 42 years. No matter what people have told me, there’s no getting over a love like hers.

Curious people, why bother with one more blog?

Who am I to ask a stranger to spend time with me and think about what I have to say?

Well, I’m not ordinary, and I’m not famous, either. A person self-employed at twelve, who left his very violent home at fourteen, and subsequently opened a newsstand at fifteen (in partnership with the esteemed co-writer of this blog), in 1965, began a kosher delicatessen at nineteen, then bought more newsstands until he opened a literary bookstore, at 25, in the politically and socially liberal Hyde Park neighborhood of the University of Chicago—is not a regular guy. I guess.

(Read on …)