The Oppenheimer Report 1/7/13

Did you all whoop it up this year? I spent the evening stone cold sober, for perhaps the first time in almost forty years. My sparkling beverage was a delicious pomegranate and blueberry lemonade concoction, with just a hint of raccoon. Intoxication quickly loses its appeal when every five minutes there is another geriatric crisis. Both in-laws are just now recovering from the flu, we have had nursing conflicts, scheduling snafus, a fall necessitating a 911 call, a nurse who had to be let go after it turned out she’d completely misrepresented her credentials (the one nurse who had come to us through an agency). Dad Taylor got sick enough at one point that we called in a doctor to put him on an antibiotic. Our First Night celebration consisted of a simple meal I prepared and which we served in the formal dining room of the Taylor house. While dinner was anything but fancy, the psychological benefits of eating a proper dinner, for the first time in three weeks, cannot be over-emphasized. Indeed this was head and shoulders above life in a hospital bed, with lights switched on and off and loud speakers blaring every half hour. Everyone appreciated the meal. Little pleasures we take for granted become monumental when put in the proper perspective.

Last Saturday was the first time since December 12^th that Mom Taylor had been out of her house. I took her out to do her banking and some shopping. She has been pining to get out of the house for weeks, and although Metro Toronto is now experiencing a widespread flu epidemic, I made the probably ill-advised decision that an outing in disease-infested Toronto might be a preferable alternative to the psychological torture of being homebound. Our mission was to buy a new cook top. The one in her kitchen needed to be replaced, and after we researched our options on “your internet” ( as in “go on your internet and find me a new cook top”), we set out to a nearby Sears to place our order.

Sears was packed last Saturday. After ten minutes searching for a suitable parking spot, we bravely threw ourselves into the mayhem which is Sears around Boxing Day. In the large appliance section we began inspecting some of the ceramic cook tops on display when a salesperson named Brian came up to us and asked us if we needed any help. I told him we’d decided on a cook top unit and just needed to buy it and arrange for installation. From that point on we entered the twilight zone. First, he tried to persuade me to buy a different product from the one we’d chosen online, with features we did not want or need, for more money than we intended to spend. Having done my Consumer Reports due diligence, I already knew what I wanted, and I politely held my ground. Strike one against Brian. At this point I took a good at the guy and did an involuntary double take. He looked like a malaria victim, suffering from a high fever, exuding an almost palpable aura of sickliness. He was a man probably in his forties, well spoken, and likely over-qualified for the position he was in, but he looked completely disheveled. His shirt was half out, his hair looked unwashed and uncombed, his bespectacled eyes were bugged out and red, and he was holding what looked like a handkerchief against his perspiring face and neck. As he rather persistently attempted to sell me something I did not want to buy, he went into a convulsive coughing fit. He made a feeble effort to cover his mouth with his arm, but the cough was so violent that he lost all control. My mother-in-law recoiled as if she’d just been exposed to the Bubonic Plague, gesturing frantically to me, and in full view of Brian, that she wanted no part of this Typhoid Marty. Brian was oblivious, likely due to his 103 degree fever, and I, figuring that by now I’d been exposed to whatever toxic germs had been spewed into the surrounding 2000 cubic feet, just wanted to complete the transaction with as much grace and expediency as possible. Had there been another salesperson available I would have dropped Brian like a hot potato, but I just wanted to get this transaction done and to get out of there. As my mother-in-law looked on horrified from a safe distance, I watched Brian, in his fevered delirium, bumbling confusedly through the necessary paperwork to complete the transaction as he babbled his fever-fueled frenzy of nonsense. At one point he was standing inches away from his manager at the cash register when he coughed directly into the guy’s face. At this point I began to laugh, and I turned around to see my mother-in-law looking as if she had just swallowed rat feces. Brian was still yammering on as I pumped a blob of the omnipresent hand sanitizer into my hand, gingerly grabbed the one corner of my invoice he had not touched, and beat a hasty retreat. The piece de resistance was that, as I was leaving, I noticed that the handkerchief with which Brian had been blotting his face was full of blood. On top of the laundry list of other disgusting things about Brian, he was bleeding from an open sore on his neck. I turned to my mother-in-law and asked: “How can I find out if I’ve contracted leprosy?” - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED