The Oppenheimer Report 9/8/14

Shauna and I met a man named Sam Fattore a year or so ago at one of the Burk’s Falls "Coffee House"open mics. I was scheduled to perform, and we arrived a little after the show had begun. There were only a few seats left and Sam and his wife Betty offered to let us sit with them. Sam was also performing that night, and he played some of his favorite “old country” covers. He had a good voice for country music - he sounded a little like Hank Snow - and I bought his CD at the end of the night. Over the next year, I bumped into Sam and Betty several times at various musical gatherings, usually at places where Sam was performing, and we would discuss our musical pursuits. While our styles were entirely different, we shared a passion for good songwriting.

Jump ahead to this past June, and I was leaving my doctor’s office after a checkup. I bumped into Sam and Betty in the lobby of the medical building. He was sitting in a chair, and Betty was at his side with  her arm around his shoulder. He said he’d experienced heat stroke while chopping wood and he looked exhausted and beat up. We spoke for a few minutes, and I said I’d see them again soon, but I walked away a little rattled. He looked much different from the vital man I‘d seen several months before. Then, last week I took Shauna to the Huntsville hospital for an X-Ray and, as we were walking out, I spotted Betty in the waiting area. Next to her was Sam, now in a wheelchair, looking as if he’d aged thirty years. One look in Betty’s eyes spoke volumes about what had happened. Since I’d last seen them, Sam had been diagnosed with lung cancer, had had one lung removed, but the cancer had spread. The prognosis was clearly grim. Shauna and I sat with them for ten or fifteen minutes while they waited for the doctor, feeling the same awkward helplessness anyone feels in that situation. We made small talk about music. In a quiet voice Sam looked sadly at his boney hands and sighed with resignation “I can’t even hold a guitar in my hands anymore.”

I spent most of last summer in Sunnybrook Hospital watching my beloved father-in-law slowly drift away. We were at that hospital every day, and in a hospital, death is your constant companion. It is an odor in the air, it is the sad look in the eyes of a passing wheelchair-bound patient, it is the helpless look of false hope in a family member’s face as they screen out the bad news a doctor is giving them. Everything in a hospital is too slow or too fast, but always out of step with the outside world. You meet and bond with complete strangers who are going through a similar experience, and you are confronted with lessons none of us can avoid. Now, just short of a year from the date of Dad Taylor’s passing, approaching Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, I find myself faced with another living ghost. I can try to blot him out of my mind, or I can dwell on him obsessively, or, as I have chosen to do of late, I can remind myself to live and to appreciate my life, our lives. I feel sometimes that as I age it is getting harder for me to connect to other people. I have to try harder. We live in an age where information is coming at us fast and hard. I can know exactly what a friend in Los Angeles is doing and exactly when he is doing it, just by consulting his Facebook page. I can even access this “information” on my phone. But as intoxicating as is the delusion that I am connecting with this friend, I am not. As much as I try to keep in touch with my friends, some are slipping away from me, fallen soldiers on the battlefield. Sam is just an acquaintance, one of the locals whom I have come to know superficially, but he is a reminder to me that we are all connected, somehow. I don’t often admit that I pray, but the older I get the more I do it. I don’t consider myself a religious man, and my problems with conventional religion are too many to list. And yet I pray. For my buddy Edmond in Buffalo, down for the count with MS, for the mother and father on the news who lost a little girl to some fiend; I pray for the all the families I see going by, like a slow motion movie shot, drifting by at the ever-accelerating speed of time.

Finally, I mention the passing of edgy comedienne Joan Rivers, who passed away last week unexpectedly after a surgical complication. Her humor was often cruel, but she always made me laugh. Not long ago I watched a movie about her recent career and it was insightful.

I think maybe I’ll try to make Sam laugh. 

 Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED