Essays, Art and Plays by Dan

The poem:

puppet theater
someone calls me by
my childhood nickname
— Cezar Ciobica (Romania)
cattails 252, October 2025

My mini-essay:

No one ever forgets their childhood nickname. For Cezar, it might have been Cezaroo—a name invented on a dusty playground for a kid who could hop from one idea to another faster than a kangaroo. The name followed him everywhere: shouted across soccer fields, scribbled on notebooks, shouted by friends in the school hallway.

At first he hated it. Cezaroo sounded ridiculous, cartoonish, impossible to take seriously. Yet the nickname carried something affectionate inside its silliness. It meant he was memorable.

Years passed. Cezar grew older, moved away, acquired titles—analyst, consultant, poet. But one day at a puppet show, someone from the old neighborhood called out across the crowd, “Hey, Cezaroo!”

And suddenly the years collapsed like folding chairs after a parade. In that moment he was ten again, running and laughing, hopping through the wild freedom of boyhood.