“Riddles”, the Mysterious Hanukkah Wooden Robot……by Robert M. Katzman
© 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.
There were pieces of unpainted pine shelves stacked against the walls left over from bookcases I’d built over the years, hinges to make folding displays, hammers, screw drivers, electric drills, handsaws (I never liked power saws) and bits of this and that lying on the tables around me and in boxes on the floor.
That quiet garage workshop was filled with ideas, if I could just grab one. Being a carpenter, even a half-assed one like I was, always made me feel like I could make something out of nothing. Magical wood, speak to me.
It was magic, in a way. The sun shines on a little sapling, it grows, the green leaves turning that sunlight, rain and good earth into plant food and it grows taller, the trunk thicker, the leaves numbering into the tens of thousands and eventually when the sapling-turned-towering tree meets an eager lumberjack, that tree becomes planks, planks derived from sunlight, and those turn into everything.
An idea formed.
I began selecting pieces of old shelves, matching them up for size. It took me an hour, but I had enough wood for what I was going to make for my little ones. Something they could not buy in any store. Something that would make Lisa, David and Rachel smile. I gathered my tools and began to work, a shape gradually coming into being, like sunlight was shining on me, too. I was making something from nothing.
Days went by. I worked a bit every evening when I returned from my quiet store. It cheered me to be productive. To be making something.
The children came to the garage to look at what I was doing, from time to time.
“What’cha making Daddy?” They would ask me.
I answered:”Something that will look just like you” I told each of them and I drilled more holes; screwed more handles into place. Their curiosity fueled me, kept me going.
The many flat pieces of wood became a vertical box with three compartments. I added a wooden Jack-in-the-Box on the top part, which was a smaller head-like box, then two strong 2 by 4 arms on either side of the box holding up a little table. I added eye-hooks screwed in everywhere to hold the arms up, and to keep shut the wooden doors to the three compartments. Each compartment was about a cubic foot. I added a wide flat platform below, with black plastic wheels, so the contraption–I was thinking it was a wooden robot, at that point–could be easily moved when pushed, even by a child.
As a last touch, and to keep my mysterious promise to them, I added little slots on each of the four sides of the “head” of my robot and slid identical rectangular pieces of glass down in each of the slots. Each was a small mirror. Even if all three children looked at the robot’s head by standing on three different sides of it, and looked into the mirrors, the robot would in fact look, “just like them”. There was a fourth side, but no fourth child to look into that mirror. It didn’t matter.
But the robot needed a name. I wanted some kind of name connected to each of the three children so they would feel it was made for them. While I was struggling with this concern, I used a thick black marker to label the top of each little door on the back of the robot, on the opposite side of the adjustable arms.
The top door for the oldest and tallest child, Lisa, went first. Under that went David’s name on the middle door, and the lowest door was for the smallest child, Rachel. I looked at my odd, heavy and clunky creation, in all likelihood much as Doctor Frankenstein looked upon his own scavenged work of art. Plain unpainted wood everywhere and shining mirrors staring out of the top on four sides. My robot’s eyes, I decided.
Lisa-David-Rachel. Rachel-David-Lisa. Hadda be some kinda name in there somewhere. I stared at the names drawn on the wood. Then I saw it. Rachel-David-Lisa. R-D-L…
Riddle!
The wooden robot’s name would be Riddle. Perfect. I was pleased.
So, when Chanukah rolled around, I presented my odd gift to the three of them, encouraging them to look it over, to touch it, to find their separate little compartments to hide their favorite toys and to see their faces in the mirrors.
Whatever each child was feeling, when each of them looked into robot’s eyes, Riddle’s eyes would reflect that emotion.
They looked amazed. It was so odd, so special, so unexpected—and so connected to each of them. Best of all, none of their more prosperous friends would have anything like it. And when they unhooked the little latch atop Riddle’s head–the Jack-in-the-Box sprang out! They were enchanted.
They played with Riddle alone, together and with their friends. They stored their stuff in their own little lockers. They put stickers on it. They raised the arms up and down and played with toy soldiers and dolls on Riddle’s flat wooden table.
Riddle moved with us from place to place, and became a special part of our lives. The children kept playing with it.
And then one day, they all grew up.
Riddle sat in a corner. Then, Riddle sat in a garage, in the gloom. Stuff collected on the flat wooden table. The old stickers peeled off. Riddle’s strong 2 by 4 arms sagged, and the four mirrors? They were gradually covered with grime and dust. No one could see themselves in Riddle’s eyes anymore. I covered Riddle with a tarp. He was forgotten.
Time passed.
One day, a baby girl appeared in our lives, in 1996. She was six weeks old. Her name was Sarah.
Four more years passed.
One day, cleaning junk out of my latest garage, I happened upon the old, dusty, tarp-covered Riddle. Riddle was sixteen at that point, but looked much older. I stared at my old ignored creation. I felt some regret.
No one had touched him, played with him in years. Then I realized that in 2000, Sarah was the same age as Rachel was when Rachel first saw the wooden toy. Both were four. Rachel was then twenty.
I hauled Riddle out of the garage, wiped him clean with old rags, polished his mirrored eyes and checked the durability of its 2 by 4 arms. Everything worked.
I wrote Sarah’s name on the top door, right below Lisa’s. Sarah, a very bright child, couldn’t write yet, but she could recognize her name. Time to present the old toy to the new child.
Sarah, like her older siblings, was charmed. She was all over it, looking into the three empty compartments, pulling on the flat table, and amazed to find her face looking back at her in Riddle’s mirrors. There was an eeriness to this new development with the robot. The fourth child, who didn’t exist when it was built, and was seemingly foretelling her arrival, finally showed up to complete the four mirrors of Riddle’s soul. Like an invisible circle around the odd wooden toy, finally completed.
Sarah, of course, didn’t have to share Riddle with the other children who were sixteen, twenty-two and twenty-five by then, and mostly gone, so she could use all three of the compartments. She came over to me where I was sitting on a couch, where I’d been watching her examine the newly rediscovered, very strange and wonderful toy she had inherited. I lifted her up and she sat on my lap. She was smiling. Sarah was always smiling. I think she had a bit of sunlight within her.
“So,” I asked her, after explaining how the name, Riddle, came into being,
“What are we going to call it now?”
Sarah looked up at me; put her little face close to mine, nose to nose, her green eyes looking intently into my brown eyes, a mischievous smile spreading across her face.
A pause, her young brain racing to reply:
“RIDDLES!!!” She cried, laughing and laughing.
How did she figure that out by herself? I have no idea.
Sarah, like the others, played with Riddles and her friends did, too.
One day some months later, alone in our basement while I was upstairs, Sarah was pulling the flat table down to play on it, when unbeknownst to any of us, one of the plastic wheels under the wooden platform holding Riddles up had worked its way loose and had somehow fallen off, weakened from years sitting in garages in constantly changing weather. As Sarah pulled down on the flat table, Riddles fell upon her. Sarah screamed, and I came running.
I freed her from the heavy wooden toy, and immediately saw the small cut on her little face. I carried her to the bathroom, washed her face, saw that it was a scratch and not serious. Putting Bactine on Sarah’s scratch did not improve the situation. Her screaming continued as I held her, and eventually, she fell asleep.
When she awoke, her affection for Riddles had cooled considerably. After some time went by, her feeling of distrust for the wooden robot didn’t change. Sarah had a small scar where the toy had scratched her delicate skin.
Reluctantly, I accepted her verdict of rejection.
Riddles was banished to our garage, again.
There it remained, for years.
Sarah grew up.
Older ourselves now, my wife Joy and I moved to a much smaller house. Sarah, now fifteen, was going into her sophomore year in high school. She was strong, athletic and beautiful, with many friends. Her tiny scar is invisible.
In order to make the downsizing move, we shed many possessions, and furniture, giving away what we could and leaving what no one wanted on the curb, where whatever we left quickly disappeared in our post-recession times.
With our own financial restraints requiring it, I moved whatever I could myself with my old van, and Joy and Sarah both helped to carry the endless boxes. Our family friend Bruce, a carpenter among his other talents, offered his larger van for the few items I could not take in my smaller van. This punishing labor continued for seven weeks, day and night. I was now 62.
By the end of May, 2012, on Joy’s 62nd birthday, I was down to my last van-load. One of the lingering items was Riddles.
None of the now married-with-children three older kids wanted the old wooden toy injected into their busy lives. I had to make a decision. Riddles was now twenty-eight.
With trepidation, I approached Sarah, whose new room had space for it, like a kind of cabinet, I suggested.
Sarah looked at me, unsmiling or sentimental in any way toward her old tormentor.
“That big thing fell on me. I still have the scar. No thanks.”
But I still cared. There was so much of me in it. So much heart. Too late. Time and space had run out on the old wooden toy.
I went back to the nearly empty old house. Riddles sat near the door, his mirrored eyes watching me as I carried still more boxes of things out to my van. I imagined it was waiting, expectantly, for its own turn to be loaded into my van to go to its new home, or garage.
I propped open the screen door, and wrestled the heavy wooden robot over the door’s step and onto the sidewalk, then awkwardly tipping it left, then right, I “waltzed” it over to the curb where all the other pieces of cast off furniture had been left to be taken by strangers driving by in cars. I tried to stand it up straight facing traffic, but the ground was slanted upward, and it would fall over. Couldn’t have that. It would be cruel to do that.
And then I thought, “But to who?”
I went back into my now nearly barren old garage, found a long thin piece of wood and broke it into smaller pieces. Then I went back over to Riddles and placed the pieces under its front platform to give it stability, to shim it up, so it would make a nice impression, on strangers.
This was so hard for me, knowing the history of the toy, knowing why it existed at all, aware of the mysterious way all four sides of its mirrored eyes eventually had a child looking into them over a twenty year period. The agony of letting go.
I unhooked and opened all three compartments to look at them. Then, I lifted the flat tray up, hooking more hooks into place for the last time, so its strong 2 by 4 arms would come into play one more time. The Jack-in-the-Box on the top had long since disappeared, after its delicate fabric rotted away. But the little painted wooden box it hid inside still remained.
I took a long look at it from several angles, feeling about as low as a toymaker could, I suppose.
Not all of us garage Geppeto’s can make a wooden toy that turns into a “real boy” like Pinocchio or even create something that anyone wants to keep playing with, anymore. Riddles was beginning to haunt me. Something transformational seemed to be happening.
Then, impulsively, irrationally, but with choked-up emotion, I slid the four mirrored eyes of Riddles out of their old slots, blinding it. I placed the four pieces of glass in the recycled box with other debris, covering them up with crumpled paper.
I didn’t want Riddles to be able to see me driving away, and leaving it behind.
Goodbye, Riddles.
Even if no one else remembers how much you meant to me when I had nothing else to give, I will always remember you.
Completely Unexpected Epilogue
After three days, no one claimed poor Riddles from the curb. I drove by each night to see about that, and saw the thin grass growing taller over his wooden base. The sense of my causing unfeeling abandonment to a strange little structure filled with meaning was too much for me. Riddles…feeling??
Ironic maybe, but I, too, was someone who was left standing shivering on a curb, in 1964, at the age of fourteen, waiting for someone to come get me in the middle of the night. I waited a long time, in the rain.
That may have been an unconscious motivator for what I had to do, for what to anyone else was just an old tricked-up wooden box with moveable arms. That may also be the answer to this particular seemingly irrational ‘riddle’.
The third night after leaving my old the wooden robot on the curb, I pulled into the driveway where I no longer lived, unhooked Riddles arms so they’d hang down flat to allow me to slide him into my van, fished through the recycled box to find his mirrored eyes, laid them on the empty passenger seat, drove back to my tiny new house, dragged him out of the van, carved some space for him in my packed garage (yes, filled with those same tools that made him, years ago), carefully positioned him in the small space, slid his eyes back in their slots and, looking both at Riddles and myself at the same time, said simply:
“Riddles, I don’t want to talk about it”.
Then I patted his 2 by 4 arm, walked out of the garage, turned out the light and locked the door. And as I walked into my tiny new home, I mused to myself,
“Well, maybe those grandkids might want to know the story of Riddles, someday…”
Last Epilogue, I promise:
Three years later, July 22, 2015:
Against all odds, after losing our home early in the Great Recession ten years ago, Joy and I purchased a home in rural Wisconsin, all birds, trees and pickup trucks. Despite the reality that both of us are now 65, again we moved ourselves over a sixty day period, day and night, three hours each time, round trip. Damn stuff seems heavier now.
Though again we left much behind, among the cherished items we took with us, was Riddles. This time however, Joy, my compassionate wife and now a beautiful Grandma, too, allowed Riddles to sit in a corner in the finished basement, fully illuminated and safe from the weather, at last.
Sarah, smart, beautiful and all grown up at 18, and with a scholarship to DePaul University in Chicago, would be living there on campus. So Joy and I would be living alone for the first time since 1978. With the ups and downs of our lives, we decided to seek peace among the chipmunks, opossum and raccoons.
I built a handmade fire pit out of oversized red bricks without using any mortar in our backyard facing an old cedar swing we had also schlepped from place to over the decades. Sometime we sit in the swing and watch the flames at night. But I digress. Easy to digress in Wisconsin.
On July 22, 2015, four days ago as I write this final (very likely) final ending to this emotional story, two of my five grandchildren, Jericho (3) and EmJay (4) came to stay overnight with us for the first time. They had never met Riddles, never heard of him and had no clue about its existence. Joy and I agreed to introduce them to him together. With memories of Sarah’s unfortunate experience with a tipsy Riddles, all contact will be supervised by Grandma or Grandpa. Its base was expanded for stability, and it no longer has wheels, either.
We told both of them, as their excitement mounted, that Riddles would look “exactly like both of them” at the same time. The looks on their faces, unsophisticated faces, was something missing in our lives for a long, long time.
We preceded them to the basement and they both tore down the stairs. We led them over to Riddles, quietly parked in his corner, probably worried about Wisconsin’s woodpeckers.
The two children, both shorter than the five-foot tall creation, stopped short in front of it and looked up at its arms and all the rest of Riddles, too. Not exactly something they’d already seen at Toys R Us or Target.
Joy and I dragged two chairs over and asked each child to stand on two different sides of Riddles and then, look into his mirrored eyes. Each did this, Jericho stretching up a little, EmJay bending down a little. Their brown eyes opened wide with wonder, their faces experienced awe. It was true what Grandma and Grampa said! Riddles did look “exactly like both of them at the same time!”
Then they jumped off of each chair and we showed them the various hooks and hinged doors. Then we turned Riddles around to face the wall and they saw the three doors to the three cabinets, the top door still painted Lisa and Sarah; the middle door still painted David and the bottom one still painted Rachel as they were in 1984 and later amended in 1999.
We showed them how to unhook the small metal hooks, both a little stained and rusty from years in various garages, and then told each child to open their own door and look inside. What was inside?
Toys!
Each squealed with delight, grabbed their separate treasures and ran upstairs to play with them, together. We closed the two doors, re-hooked them and turned Riddles around, attempting to absorb the emotion of the big wooden toy meeting the third generation in our family. We never thought this would happen. Likely, neither did Riddles.
Over the next three days, I thought about all of this and how much it meant to me, in particular. Not everything is clear, immediately.
There are more grandchildren to meet Riddles, our fifth one born this year on the fifth day of the fifth month. Eventually, Jacobi will play within Riddles, too. Somewhere down the road, I expect Sarah’s children would be charmed to meet Riddles. And, like before, one day all of them will grow up and go on to other toys, other lives which don’t include Riddles.
Joy and I, if God wills it, will be in our 80’s by then. I’m thinking-hoping that one of the grandchildren will treasure the toy and end up inheriting Riddles, who will then one day survive Grandma and Grandpa. All of this is a wish dwelling deep within me.
As I type this final ending to this 31-year old Robot’s story, the tears are coming now. It is becoming more difficult to type. I stopped, and then this happened, and I wrote the following words afterwards:
I walked out of my basement office over to Riddles, a dozen feet away from me. I gazed intensely into his mirrored eyes, seeing him, seeing me. Then I turned the tall toy around and knelt on the ground in front of the three named doors. I had never done this unexpected thing before. I put my human arms around Riddle’s wooden middle and hugged him. My face flat against the Lisa/Sarah door; my chest against the David door, and my knees against Rachel’s door.
In this dream state, I felt the fusion happening between us; I was Riddles, I realized. And Riddles was me. We were one, human and wooden. Could Riddles feel the warmth of my now old heart in its old rusty hooks and hinges? Did Riddles have a wooden soul?
I am unembarrassed in my surrender to surreal emotion. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about this. Still, I’m writing it down, perhaps for others who can understand the incomprehensible.
Some of you reading these last words will be thinking,
“This is ridiculous and this guy is crazy!”
Maybe.
But me?
I believe.
***************************
And, yes, the story continues. Almost three years later, it turned out that it wasn’t “God’s will” that Joy would live with me into our 80’s. Cancer swiftly overwhelmed her, and us, and nothing could stop it. She died at home, on Mother’s Day, May 14th, 2017, a Sunday. And in the strange way life evolves as this story describes, Joy was a Lutheran when we met, converted to Judaism over a year and by sheer chance, the day she died surrounded by her children and me, was also Israel’s 69 anniversary.
Almost a year after that, now it is April 20 2018, and I’m thinking that maybe all this means nothing. But I loved the woman for 42 years and now Riddles and I will go on by ourselves, without her. This story began when I was 34 and in ten days I’ll be 68, the same amount of time, doubled.
It may be that Fate determined that Joy would no longer be with me on this strange journey, but I don’t have to like it. She’s gone now, but my love for her, or perhaps our love for her, like a tree, perhaps, and grow.
Riddles and me, we will endure.
Publishing News!
Bob Katzman’s two new true Chicago books are now for sale, from him! Vol. One: A Savage Heart and Vol. Two: Fighting Words
Gritty, violent, friendship, classic American entrepreneurship love, death, heartbreak and the real dirt about surviving in a completely corrupt major city under the Chicago Machine. More history and about one man’s life than a person may imagine.
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Send me a money order with your return and contact info. I will get your books to you within ten days. Here’s complete information on how to buy my books:
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My Fighting Words Publishing Co. four original books, published between 2004 and 2007 are now out-of-print. I still have some left and will periodically offer them for sale on my new website. My hour-long story reading at WGTD 91.1 NPR Kenosha, Wis is now a podcast. The interview and story can be heard here:
Speaking of Our Words June 30th, 2017 With special guest star and featured writer Bob Katzman. Bob reads his memoir, “Audrey, Pink Bunny Slippers, Her Cat and the God’s Eye”. Your comments are welcome, below, and please tell others I can be found here as a writer. I can also be hired as a speaker for organizations, etc, both here and in Europe. Seeking an agent. robertmkatzman@gmail.com Poet & Storyteller for hire for organizations, schools or private events www.DifferentSlants.com to view recent and older examples of my work
Preview YouTube video Speaking of Our Words – June 30th, 2017
Speaking of Our Words – June 30th, 2017