THe Oppenheimer Report - 4/25/11

About a week ago, I received an email from our high school class agent informing me that one of my classmates had died suddenly. A few days later I got a message that another one had passed away. While I wasn’t particularly close to either of the deceased, we were all boarders together, and in contrast to some of today’s giant high school populations, our class at boarding school was a relatively small and close knit community. When I got the news, I pulled out my Taft yearbook --we were the class of ’74 -- and paged through the pictures. I was an aspiring photographer back in my high school days, and I took quite a few senior pictures for the yearbook my junior and senior years. I found a photo taken by Morgan “Gaz” Garwood, one of the deceased. It was spooky to see it, because I was present when it was taken, and I remember details about the day. It was a good day, and I took a lot of pictures as well. One of them was the photo above, which became the senior picture for my classmate Bill Worcester. In that picture, the guy aiming his camera at me is Morgan, and the guy to the left, holding a beer and looking at the camera, is John Slate, the other deceased. Out of six people in that photo, two are now gone, and that‘s a bit of a kick in the pants for me. Among other things, John was a talented artist, and we sometimes hung out with the same people, usually when we were smoking weed out on the school golf course. While I didn’t know either of them very well, both were interesting characters, and I liked them.




As Death points his boney finger at the class of ‘74, I am shocked out of my middle-aged complacency to remind myself that it was 37 years ago I took that picture, and that I am not a young man anymore. You laugh, and think to yourself, “well of course you’re not a young man anymore you cretin, you’re 55!” yet I have somehow cocooned myself in a thin veneer of age denial. While I have effectively maintained the emotional maturity of a fifteen year-old, something of which I am proud, these deaths really shook me back to the present. Off the top of my balding head, I can think of five or six of my Taft classmates who have passed on, and I have become uncharacteristically philosophical this past week. In many ways Taft shaped me into the odd character I am today, and the older I get, the more I realize what that institution and my classmates meant to me. As I said in a recent email note to some friends, I am saddened to hear of these deaths, but I am thankful to have had the time I did with those guys. At that awkward point in my life I felt un-judged and accepted by those people, and I will miss them.



I leave you with excerpts from two of my songs; the first a love song written years ago about my travels with Shauna, and the second a song I wrote two weeks ago about self doubt. Please indulge me, as both seem to be pertinent this week.



from THE TIME WE FOUND

“I used to wonder about the ones who moved on

I used to long to know where they had gone

Gazed in a mirror an wondered what can be done

When twenty years have passed as if they are one.



Cho: In a room where people walk around

Some walk in and some walk out

We see the motion but we hear no sound

We get so lost in the time we found”



from A DISHONEST MAN

Truth or dare, but what do you care, as long as you get some tonight?

Leaders and lowlifes, we all live with white lies

Then tell ourselves we fight the good fight

Sun-glassed eyes, poker-faced lies, bluffing all the way to the top

But when you’re nine tenths dead, coughing in bed

Don’t you wish that you could make it all stop?”



Cho: Honesty, honestly, I don’t know what that means anymore

Infrequently, I can see the man I was long before

Used to be, I could feel, when a lie punched a hole in my soul

Currently, constantly, the man in the mirror is a whore

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED