Different Slants

by Robert M. Katzman © April 9, 2018

I first posted this beginning part on Facebook on April 3, 2018. But what I wished and hoped for isn’t what happened. Read the older part first and my story will begin after that:

Ok, this is a little eerie. Well, everything I write about probably seems a little eerie. A little over a year ago, I bought a 1993 suburban car/van because it was big enough to carry my wife’s wheelchair, walker and other things she needed to go visit our children and our friends.

What once was a casual get-up-and-go on impulse to do something, morphed into a production of trying to get her out of the house, down the three steps and then into the van by putting a step down for her to use to move up. This woman was a gymnast at Thornton High School in 1967.

Whenever I became exasperated by having so much to do, I imagined what an insult this progressive decline of her body had become to her, and I kept quiet. We were in the last act of a tragedy, and we both knew it.

That old van moved our smart daughter Sarah three times when she transferred from The Univ. of Wisconsin to Columbia College in Chicago. And I used it, with silent pain, to redistribute all of Joy’s clothes and other possessions to our children and friends. She would have preferred that. Nothing was wasted.

But underneath all of these things which did happen, was the idea that:

“What if I ever published a book again? How will I go get it without a van? But I can’t afford a van.”

Time went by.

After a year of thinking about the size and style of what I’d need, and settling on the unusual shape of the Suburban GMC, I drove around wondering how I’d get one.

Then, on a Sunday, driving around a street I knew in Wisconsin, I spied this lone Suburban, and it looked fascinating, and old, too. It was at a place called Last Stop Motors, at 4318 Douglas Avenue, in Racine, Wisconsin.

I drove into the lot, which was closed, took a good look at the van and felt it could work, if the guy who owned the lot, Ron Last and his pretty wife Carole were willing. I knew him. He was a good guy and somewhat spiritual. If you are still reading, this is a perfect example of why I never write fiction.

The next day, Monday, I asked Ron about the van, told him a little of why I needed it and my limitations. He listened. Then he told me this was very strange because he acquired the van two days before and wondered if he made a mistake because the van was 25 years old. He said I was the first person to ask him about it. He told me he felt I was sent, that I wasn’t shopping. There was quiet. There are situations where quiet is the only response. Then Ron told me what he wanted for it.

I listened and then, assuming this was going to be a swift ending to our meeting, offered him half of that. He stared at me again. Then he told me he felt, with my wife’s bad situation, that I was intended to buy that van and money wasn’t going to prevent it. I was, again, speechless.

He rose, offered me his hand and told me he accepted my counter offer. A day later a friend dropped me off and I drove the van home. Mostly, for the past year, except for Sarah, it has been parked in my backyard, patiently waiting for something to do. I’m not sure it will even start now.

But in a couple of days, the van I essentially dreamed would one day be necessary for me to pick up some imaginary book I’d write and have printed, will be driven 80 miles south to pick up an initial run of only 400 books, 200 of each one, because I have no damn idea in the world who might want them. I’m not completely crazy.

But dreams can become reality; no matter how much pain a person may suffer in between the beginning of it and the end of it. The old van will do what I dreamed it would do. The rest is up to me.

Well, then this is what actually happened next, beginning on Wednesday, April 4, 2018:

I thought my assumed adventure would be better if I checked on my cars “start-ability” so I stuck my fanny in the van’s cold unfamiliar seat after having let the poor old thing sit for months, and the car wouldn’t start.

So, I jumped it myself, because I know how to do that: Heavy duty jump cable’s red copper clamped on the positive metal posts extending a little bit above of the battery, then, one black cable on the dead car’s negative battery post and the other clamp on part of the good car’s engine block. Turn off all electrical things in both cars first. But nothing happened.

Tried it several times, let the thing charge for a couple hours, no luck, so I checked with three places and the best deal was at Menards, who took the dead battery in trade, too. Cost: $99.83

Remember that the whole point of having your own van is to not bear the cost of have about 30 boxes shipped to me. But I didn’t let this little speed bump deter me. Van must have needed a new battery. Fine.

So, the next day I drove all around colorful Racine testing all the other parts of the van that were important, especially steering, braking and the tires. No problem. Bu the van was so ancient, it only had a cassette player in the dashboard. But still, a great radio.

Went home, parked it, waited for the call from lovely Lynn to come from my Carol Stream, Illinois printer get the books and the call came on Thursday afternoon, April 5, 2018. I told Lynn I’d leave after the morning rush hour in Chicago and get to her by noon so I could load up the boxes, turn around and get back to Wisconsin by 2 PM.

On the way back, I made arrangements with the massive and excellent packaging company, Uline, based in Kenosha next to the I-94 Interstate to get my small order of three different sized boxes and one bag of pink packing peanuts for mail orders for the hardcopy of my books. Since there exists no business as of now, I had to guess based on dreams and hope. But I have a lot of entrepreneurial experience with wishin’ and hope’n.

I was gonna drop off my 2009 MacBook Pro laptop at Best Buy because I got a message on my only slightly cracked screen that the poor thing had viruses and I should deal with it. I did that. Best Buy had a yearly maintenance contract with me to maintain my emotional security, so I checked that item off of my list and drove a little south then west toward the big interstate highway which was gonna take me 80 miles south to the small industrial complex where Copresco Printing is located, in the urban wilderness.

But as I drove happily west to get my books, I noticed the van’s temperature gauge needle went all the way over to the right side red danger zone. Fearing a busted radiator antifreeze hose, I slowed down to about ten miles an hour and crept back north and east, about four miles, to bring my fragile van to Firestone on Highway 20, the main drag to Racine Town.

Nice people, they know me from other visits, saw me almost immediately and after a little while a young guy named Mac told me that my 25-year-old radiator was leaking and had to be replaced. I consented. Time passed.

When they located the right replacement and checked everything over, then pressure-checked the cooling system, everything passed successfully and I was on my way to get my precious books…again. But now it was 3 PM and my experienced truck-driver plan of “avoiding rush hour” scheme was kablooey.

For the radiator’s replacement part, labor and a bunch of new anti-freeze, the cost: $535.66

I was pretending to hold onto my resolve that I was, eventually, when thousands of more books were needed to satisfy nationwide hunger for my deathless prose, going to be better off having my own means of transport.

Because I’m an independent senior-citizen son-of-a-bitch.

Yep.

As I drove out of Firestone, I called my friend Glenn Gordon to ask him if he wanted to take a little ride with me, because I wanted company and maybe he’d come, too. But Glenn said no, not today.

Then, a couple of minutes later, my Racine Rabbi Martyn Adelberg called me and asked if I would please show up for Shabbat services at 10 AM Saturday, the next day, because they were hoping for ten people to be there to form a minion, or the minimum number of adult Jews assembled together in one place to allow the Temple’s old sheepskin Torah to be taken out of its ornate and carved wooden ark, carefully, lovingly opened and read.

According to Wikipedia: “Written entirely in Hebrew, a sefer Torah contains 304,805 letters, all of which must be duplicated precisely by a trained sofer (“scribe”), an effort that may take as long as approximately one and a half years”.

I assured him I would be there. After all, it was nineteen hours away.

My carpenter-grandfather Jacob from Mogilev, Byelorussia, told my father Israel in Yiddish: “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht” who then translated it and then repeated to me in English when I was a child in the Fifties: “Man plans, and God laughs”.

That thought didn’t occur to me at that moment, however.

Blending my attractive blue and white van into the sea of moving metal going south toward Chicago, I kept motoring along, like a steer on a cattle drive. I knew I had an extra margin of time to reach Lynn and Copresco and everything would be fine.

Two hours later, I was moving along like cooling lava, then exiting on North Avenue to go twenty miles east toward far western suburban Carol Stream. It was too tight to get there by five, unfortunately, but when I was sure of that, at exactly five, I called Lynn and gently encouraged her to wait for the slightly doomed author to come get his dear books. Please.

Lynn, a person of strong character, and as it turned out, a sea of compassion for strange writers like me, agreed to wait. An angel of print.

About ten minutes before reaching the printing plant, my temperature gauge again traveled swiftly to the right to the red danger zone of my temperature gauge. This was not only disturbing in itself, but also where I was and what time it was, too.

Slowing down a little, I arrived at Copresco by 5:30 PM, where Lynn was awaiting me, and surprisingly, a nice man named John was also there and guided my van to back in backwards toward where the two pallets of books were piled up and ready to go. That’s when I first saw the mostly clear but slight rusty fluid swiftly dripping out of somewhere above my right rear tire, puddling on the clean swept floor of their warehouse, along with my melting hopes of getting back home.

 Telling both of them how sorry I was for the fluid dripping, both John and Lynn were surprisingly sympathetic, which I didn’t expect because I knew that both of them probably had other plans than cleaning up after me on a Friday night. John and I together quickly loaded the van completely; because he knew and I knew that time wasn’t on my side when my van was leaking some mysterious something.

I asked my smart phone where the nearest Firestone was, which was a mile away, but at 6 PM, the nice people there told me it was too late and their tech guy had gone home. Then they called around to find another Firestone which was still open with tech guys still working there. They found one in Glen Ellen Illinois, wherever that was, but the tiny lady in my cell phone told me to calm down and that it was about four miles away, in the wrong direction. So I went there. Slowly.

At about 6:30 PM, I pulled into the third Firestone dealer of the day and met Hector and his wife Christina, who were very nice, told me to give them the keys and they took over the van to solve and fix my dripping problem.

I decided to go eat dinner, somewhere, and found a small, empty sort of hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. I picked a table, asked the waitress for a bowl of hot and sour soup, shrimp egg foo young (cooked crispy) and two egg rolls, deciding that wasn’t very exotic and most likely it would be edible.

It was terrific! Too much food, I was packing up half of it to take back to faraway Racine when Hector called to say that the van’s rusty rear circulating coolant pipe had burst because of the replaced new radiator which had then subsequently shifted, he said, the pressure to the next weakest point in my van, and the rust simply gave way.

I stopped packing my next day’s dinner and thought about the consequences of the rusty rear pipe, when Hector then added that he didn’t have the correct part and needed to order it the next day.

Oh, I thought. I see.

I walked back to his Firestone building and considered the possibilities, which were few especially when carless. I asked Christina where a cheap safe motel might be after they rejected the idea that I sleep in my van overnight after they closed up for the night. They told me the motel right next to them was ok, they felt, and I should go see what it cost and if they had a room.

I quickly went there and asked the clerk who appeared to me to be from the sub-continent, if he had a cheap room. Smiling and friendly, he told me there were only three rooms left and one for me would be $76.95. Plus tax. I paused for a moment, swirling in new debt.

Then, barely audible to him, I asked the clerk his name and was he from India? Why? Because I, a writer, realized that I was in the middle of what, at this point, was some sort of cruel trial, an odyssey and I was taking names. His was Ibrahim, he was Pakistani, and he stood there waiting for me to decide.

I started mumbling to myself, then, that,

“I was only down here in Illinois just to pick up my new books and one thing after another kept happening and I, ah, I was…”

Then Ibrahim broke the silence, asking me if I was a writer because he was a writer, too, working on his PHD and then he looked more closely into his computer and then to me and said, conspiratorially,

“How about just $65 tonight because you should get the writer’s discount.”

I stared at him, thinking: Ok, there’s Triple A, there’s senior citizen discount, and now…the Writer’s Discount?

It was the gesture that surprised me, his friendliness in a humorous way to help out a person in trouble who happened to be a writer, like him. And as usual, I was dressed like someone who fell of a truck somewhere and was run over by a horse. Maybe that was a factor.

I thanked Ibrahim, told him I had to go back and get my stuff and the Chinese food I’d left with Hector and Christina because for some reason, Firestone didn’t have a refrigerator–I mean, they sold coolant, right?–and there was no place to safely leave my food.

But as I walked back, the kind offer of $65 for the night was just one more brick piling upon my shoulders and I longed for a choice, for a change. It was now near 8 PM; about ten hours since I got up and was preparing to go on what I thought was a brief and happy jaunt.

When I was holding my box of stuff plus the large bag of leftover Chinese food, after telling Hector and Christina that this situation was so frustrating and that $65 was too much for me to pay to sleep for a few hours, when Christina told me, after I offered them $40 to sleep on their couch for the night, that there was this motel near by, the Highland Manor Motel in Lombard just down the road a few miles east and why not stay there, because they only charged $52 a night. She offered to call that place and see if they had a vacancy before driving me there.

I asked her why she was being so nice to me, a total stranger, and she replied that Hector and she had been homeless for two years and then ended up living in that motel for five years, but also because of her strong Christian faith that if you offer any person kindness when they needed it, maybe she and Hector would also receive kindness, again, if they ever needed it. And their lives had been very hard. Hector then told me he was from Guadalajara, Mexico and it wasn’t easy to make it in America.

I watched Christina calling that Motel as I was thinking: It was long after normal closing time for this weary couple.

Here I was, a stranded Jewish man in his sixties holding a cooling bag of leftover Chinese food, being offered shelter and transportation by a middle-aged Mexican man and his wife, after a Pakistani guy next door offered me a better rate for the night because we were both writers. And that likely this involved a Muslim as well as this Christian couple.

And I was thinking what a strange place America is, and that’s why everybody in this little drama probably went through hell to get here, and once here, mostly, I have learned are quick to help another person in trouble. As a wise friend once said to me: a hand up or a hand out.

The call produced a favorable reply and the rate was as Christina thought it would be, or maybe because she took a while explaining to the desk clerk there, whom she evidently knew, what my situation was. I’m not sure. Then we all drove there, leaving my lonely van behind me locked up for the night.

Casey was at the desk and a friendly easy-going guy. I showed him an ID, signed the registration and then spontaneously offered Casey the bag of Chinese food, who was delighted to get it and told me he was very hungry. He gave me a key to Room Ten. So, another $52.00 tacked on my growing tab.

Hector then said he’d be back to open Firestone at seven and most likely be done by 8:30 AM so I could get to my temple by 10 AM. I shook hands with Christina and Hector, told them thanks very much, and she replied she’d pick me up at 8:30 AM to take me back to Firestone to pick up my van so I could get back on the road. Then they drove off.

I dropped my stuff in the room and went for a walk for a little while. It was close to 9 PM. Wandering east on Roosevelt Road when almost all the stores were closed, I saw a Goodwill store and decided to walk in and wander around for a few minutes and see if they had any good cheap used videos.

I found three old John Wayne movies, Rio Bravo, The Cowboys and Cahill: United States Marshall which collectively were about $8.00. I took them up to the register just as the place was closing and met Marcus, a tall thin young black young man who quickly asked me if I was Military or a student which made me smile, and he said it was 50% off for those kind of people that day. So, I told him I was a writer and my books taught people how to do things, and Marcus, with no hesitation at all, instantly cut my bill to $4.00

Marcus, you are cool.

The next morning, Christina picked me up, drove me to Firestone and after a while, Hector told me no one had the right parts for my old van so they would do a sort of “secure rear coolant bi-pass” instead at no charge to me. But by then it was after 9 AM.

I sat down where the several chairs were and met a tall blond older man whose name turned out to be Nicolas and he was from Sweden. I told him I once owned a foreign-language bookstore and sold both travel books and maps all about Sweden, that I’d been there five times, and it was the only place in Europe I ever read my poetry in a cafe in Uppsala, Sweden and even sold some of my first books. There was a sign outside of the cafe announcing my presence in both Swedish and English.

Nicolas, obviously surprised and amused, smiled broadly; we shook hands and had a rich conversation for the next hour.

Nicolas and I discussed his country, our travels, places we both knew about and delicately, current politics in the United States and Sweden. I informed him that I was aware of Sweden’s (formerly) famously progressive way of running their country and that once I’d read in a book how those ideas migrated across the sea to the USA, went to both the East and West coasts first, then jumped into Minnesota and slowly spread everywhere throughout the rest of the county, the last place willing to consider liberal concepts being Utah. He laughed.

I called the Rabbi to apologize for my unexpected absence, but you can’t answer phones in a Temple on Shabbat on Saturday morning. He’d hear it later on. It was getting close to noon. Hector was finished with the van, told me it was again being carefully pressure-tested so there would be no more “Firestone Surprises” in store for me that weekend, and then (of course) informed me that I needed a new thermostat because the older one was damaged by the death of the original radiator. I smiled, a little. Then we settled up. Cost: $180.81

I didn’t bother rationalizing anything, anymore, and took off twenty miles east to connect to the northbound Interstate 94. My economy trip to get my books in my own van now had cost: $867.70

I didn’t include the videos or the Chinese food. Those two were the only voluntary choices.

I better sell some fucking books, man.

I called ahead to Uline to tell them I was on my way to make sure they’d still be open, which they would be, and regretted my not being there the day before, but they were gracious and told me not to think about that.

I arrived in Kenosha, Wisconsin an hour later at their football field-sized building, pulled into the customer service pick-up area, met Ryan and Raphael, whom I then asked: Does everybody who worked there have to have an R at the beginning of their name, because, if so, I was Robert and I needed a job. They laughed.

We talked a little more, then I tried to open up the back of my van electrically with the “Open Hatch” dashboard switch, which strangely didn’t work, so then I opened it with a key. I put the flat boxes and the big bag of pink packing peanut into the van and closed the doors. Saying good-bye to Ryan and Raphael, I climbed into the van’s seat, put my key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing.

But the van was dead.

Ryan and Raphael immediately knew something was off.

I put the car in neutral because it was on a downward slant to the ground and rolled out of the way to a flat area, then I opened up the hood to investigate the latest mystery of my literary life. I checked the brand new battery, touching the cables which connected the car’s electrical system to the battery and noticed they moved kind of easily. Then Ryan pulled up behind me in his car.

He was carrying a portable charging system which also could inflate flat car tires, and which he also informed me that Uline sold. I thought that was so cute. Get a little ad in there as he came to my rescue. But after discussing the amazing and surprisingly lightweight device, I requested that I had to know if I could have fixed the problem myself, first. He agreed. I found a lock wrench type of tool in my collection of portable tools and went to the battery to see if I could tighten the cables successfully and start-up the car again. I put in the key and the big motor roared immediately. I then thanked Ryan, again, and took off to Best Buy to get my waiting laptop.

But first, I immediately called Uline again and got Susan who had this terrific voice, and asked for a manager to express my appreciation for both men, how helpful they’d been to a customer in apparent peril and that I believed too many people called to complain but rarely did anyone take the time to praise.

Susan told me she was that person at this point and agreed with me about my perspective. I requested that she pass along the compliment to the appropriate people, just like she herself would want someone to do for her, too.

That done, I got back up on Interstate 94 to bring me further north to State Highway 11 in Racine and took off toward Best Buy, where my computer wasn’t ready yet. A major surprise, of course. At the end of my line, finally, I decided to open up the back hatch, the switch working this time, and sat on the bottom part of it, noticing the sun was setting and perfectly illuminating the back of my truck. Well!

I’m a photographer, had brought a digital camera with me to record the picking up of my new books for the first time in ten years and decided that this was the properly lit closing moment of my day.

I retrieved one each of my new books: A Savage Heart and Fighting Words, and propped them up against the stacks of brown cardboard boxes in the back of my loaded van, letting the sun shine freely upon them. Then I backed myself up a ways to find the best angle to record this moment in time and snapped the shutter.

I was thinking sort of sadly to myself that I wished my wife of 42 years had been able to share this moment with me, but she had died ten months earlier on Mother’s Day, May 14th. She had told told me about two weeks before the end, that I should do nothing to find a new love, that one would appear one day and everything would work out for me. She was smiling when she said this unusual thing for me to hear from her, and I just kissed her and said nothing in reply. What could I say?

I was standing there in the Best Buy parking lot looking at the back of my van, kinda wishing Joy was there, too, so she could take a picture of me sitting on the lower door while I was leaning back against the wall of boxes, while holding my books in my lap, facing the camera.

Just then, I heard this woman’s voice saying,

“Are those your books? Did you write them?”

I turned around to see who it was and the nice voice came from this maybe five-foot tall woman with thick wavy hair down to her shoulders. She was about fifty or so, pretty face, pretty good figure and wearing everything made from blue jeans cloth, which fit her very well.

I quickly replied that, yes, they were, and yes, I was.

Then, just as abruptly, seizing the moment I asked pretty Miss Blue Jeans if she would please take my picture while I sat on the back of my van holding my books, because I didn’t have anyone with me to do that, and handed her the camera as she came closer to me. She immediately agreed. I liked her face as she smiled.

I sat there and she took the picture, then she said wait, to let her take another one to make sure she got it, and I thought how odd it was a stranger would care about that. Then she came back toward me to give me the camera and I asked her what her name was.

She relied, “Michelle”.

I thanked her and shook her hand, small and warm, then took one of my business cards out of my breast pocket to give to her saying,

“If you’re curious, Michelle, ” saying her name back to her, “go to my website on the card (differentslants.com) and you can read anything you want, for free, ok?”

I didn’t mention that my phone number was also on the card. I didn’t ask for hers. She thanked me, smiled again and walked away back to her car. I watched.

Then, musing to myself, while sitting there relaxing in the sunlight with my books and camera in my arms, that:

What if all of the bad things that happened to me one after another, beginning with the worn radiator and everything else that kept me overnight in Lombard, and then the rest, delaying all of my plans in order to bring me to this precise point, in this parking lot, deciding to open the rear of my van to photograph my two books just as pretty Miss Blue Jeans was leaving Best Buy and noticed the peculiar sight of what I was doing?

Why was it only Michelle who spoke to me?

This is a wonderful mystery.

What if there was this cosmic grand plan to have this woman meet me after my having had a classic series of comically ridiculous situations.

Was Firestone in on this?

“Man plans and God laughs?”

Really?

So, um, listen, Michelle, I was thinking that if you should happen to read this story, and you know, if you’re not married or anything like that and you’d like to have a cup of coffee with me so I could thank you for taking my picture and well, we could see what happens after that? How about that?

Oh…

(262) 752-3333 in case you, um, lost my card.

Thanks, Michelle,

From that strange guy with the two books in the Racine Best Buy parking lot, in case you might have forgotten all about this lovely moment in time.

It would be so cool if you’d answer, Michelle.

So cool…

So, 586 days later, or a total of 923 days after Joyce died, and my confused efforts at trying to figure out dating at ages 67 thru 69 reliably floundered, a lovely woman did in fact appear in my life–just like that–and she was so much like Michelle it was startling. Her name is Nancy and we have been a couple since November 23, 2019.

I think somewhere, somehow, floating in the Cosmos, Joy had a hand in all of this, she and is now smiling her lovely smile.

Maybe?