by Robert M. Katzman © August 28, 2013
Small boy swinging on an old tire
Hanging from a thick branch
Of an old willow tree
Sun is shining, the air cool
A black cloud floats by
Blots out the sun
Cold raindrops start to fall
He’s swinging on a big old tire
He won’t let go
***
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355
© August 18, 2013
I have something to say about the new movie, “The Butlerâ€. I wonder sometimes why I write anything here, to a seemingly growing group of people I don’t really know and also the disturbingly fundamental fact that I’m not paid for it.
But the movie struck me so strongly and my impression was so different than the somewhat snotty and disdainful recent NPR review that I felt I wanted to cancel them out, in my own obscure microscopic voice. What’s the point of Freedom of Speech if a person has something contradictory and worthwhile to say, but doesn’t bother because there’s no personal reward in it?
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355
by Robert M. Katzman © August 3, 2013
(Some dates and words updated, seven years later)
When Bill was born, Grover Cleveland was president of the United States. Horses walked the streets of New York City and Chicago. Victoria was on Britain’s throne and seven million Jews lived across Europe, my family among them.
The Spanish-American War was two years away. World War One? Eighteen years in the future. About 65 million people lived in America. Civil War veterans, tens of thousands of them, marched in military memorial parades. Penicillin was decades away and women couldn’t vote until 1920, nor Native Americans until 1924. Great Britain was the most powerful nation on earth, or at least they thought so.
Truman was my first president, April 30, 1950. Hitler was dead five years exactly. My horses were only in the movies. No Interstate Highways yet, but soon, after Eisenhower was elected. Israel was a new country, and Europe was emptied of Jews. But all four of my grandparents were living in the USA. My relatives who couldn’t get here in time, evaporated with the rest of them. Great Britain? Now, an insignificant and irrelevant island, a little larger than the State of Illinois, sitting quietly about twenty miles off the coast of France.