I got a customer, Mrs Rose Kleiderman, she comes in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon, she must be 95. Her skin looks like parchment. She lives somewhere in the neighborhood. She comes alone. She can't weigh more than 80 pounds; maybe she's four foot six, eight tops. She orders the same things every time: a bowl of chicken matzoball soup, a salami omelette with hashbrown potatoes, drinks maybe four cups of coffee, finishes it off with a piece of rugelach, leaves a ten per cent tip, reminds me that she knew my parents, and shuffles out onto Broadway.

I got a customer, Morton Grolnik, he comes in every day except Sunday for a breakfast of coffee, orange juice, oatmeal, and whole-wheat toast. He tells me that he likes to start his day among Jews. He lives in a nearby assisted-living joint on Sheridan Road called The Wrenwood. He brings a Sun-Times in with him and every morning makes a number of hypothetical bets on baseball, football, and basketball games. "Can you believe it, Jerry," he'll say to me, "the Bears are six-point dogs," or "I'm taking the Eagles and the points." Every morning, on leaving, he tells me how much he is ahead or behind for the year.

I've lots of other regulars, but maybe the strangest are two guys, Harold Kizerman and Morrie Feigenbaum. They meet here every Tuesday and Thursday for lunch. They both sport beards, white and not very well trimmed, and they eat with their caps on. Feigenbaum, a large man, must weigh somewhere around 300, maybe more, rides in on an electronic chair. Kizerman is slender, tall, with a permanently somewhat pissed-off look. They take one of the centre tables — in his chair, Feigenbaum can't fit in a booth — and usually stay at least two hours.

One day a year or so ago, Kizerman left a large black spiral notebook behind. I couldn't resist looking inside. In a scrawling handwriting he had written what I guess are a number of poems. One, with the title "Climate Change," ended with these words:

 

Tsunami and fire, earthquake, tornado, and storm,
Disaster's man's lot, misery henceforth the norm.

Not very cheery stuff, if you ask me, but then no one's asking, certainly not Kizerman, and what he does is his business.

One day, heading back to the kitchen, passing their table, I noted they were reading aloud to each other, each holding a bunch of typewritten pages in his hand. I couldn't make out what it was, and later, after they had gone, I asked Gladys, their waitress, who has been at Rappaport's since my father's day, if she knew what the reading aloud was about.

"They're writing a play," she said, "leastwise that's what they told me."