The Oppenheimer Report 4/30/18

There were a surprising number of responses to last week’s post about the passing of my friend’s father. I guess I was a little surprised by how that subject resonated with so many of my boomer friends, now facing, or having recently faced, the imminent mortality of our parents. I feel as if I preceded many of my peers in dealing with the decline and passing of my parents, and I watch with great empathy as others cope with some of the challenges we all face. One thing we all seem to share in this complicated phase of our lives is the number of times we mutter to ourselves, “I didn’t see that coming.”

A few weeks ago, “Silver Lake” Joe Thompson, host of the live show that airs shortly before my radio show Thursday nights, asked me if I would fill in and guest host for him this past week. He was taking his dad back to his homeland in Northern Ireland for a visit. They’d been there not too long ago, but Joe’s dad couldn’t recall the trip, because he has dementia. When he realized that he had forgotten the trip he was assured he had made, Joe’s dad asked if perhaps he could go back again. Maybe he won’t remember this trip either, but I suspect that Joe felt this might be the last time he would be well enough to make the journey, so he arranged to do everything, again. I was moved by the gesture, and I think about all the other friends I know who are on their own unique journey with their parents.

My dad and I were like oil and water when I was growing up. He was well into his 40s when I was born, and we gave each other a pretty hard time. I was a difficult teenager, and I regret the valuable time lost before I got to know my dad. Thankfully, our relationship improved considerably over the years, especially after I started working in the family business, and we developed a strong mutual respect. The final stage of our journey as father and son was when he and mom needed assistance in old age. It is a seismic change in our duties as children, when we take on the task of assisting our parents in old age. It’s all complicated by issues of pride, independence, role reversal, and a hundred other mind-boggling variables that affect every family differently. While my journey with my mom and dad is over, I can empathize with the spiritual struggles my friends face as they tend to end stages of the ones they love.

I was touched when I heard Joe was taking his dad back to Ireland, perhaps for the last time (perhaps not). Last week, a friend responded to my report, by saying that a day doesn’t go by when he doesn’t think about his parents, gone these many years. One thing I can say is that I let both of mine know how much I loved them before they passed. The love you give is equal to the love you take. It's all we really have in the end, isn't it? There was a photo Joe posted on Facebook the other day, and it was of his father, with a serene look on his face, eyes closed, basking in the sun somewhere near the northern tip of Northern Ireland. The caption read “Daddy-O at the Causeway”, and It made me smile. I have a few of those photographs tucked away in my mind as well. Joe, it looks like you’ve turned out to be a pretty good son. Enjoy the ride my friend.      

  - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 4/23/18

Bob Miller Jr. and I

Last week, I got the call that the father of one of my oldest friends had passed on. “Captain Bob” Miller, as one of my other Buffalo friends nicknamed him, was unanimously voted “coolest dad” when we were all just neighborhood rug rats. I didn’t really get to know “Big Bob”, as I called him (my friend is Bob Jr.) until I was into my early teens, but he was legendary in our neighborhood for being a lot of fun to be around. He was funny, irreverent, sometimes naughty, and he somehow tapped in to the inner scofflaw mentality of the kids in our neighborhood. Big Bob had a lot of boy in him, right up until the end. He had a deep and abiding love for high performance cars, and if you caught a ride with “Big Bob”, it was likely in some exotic high performance American muscle car, or one of the many Porsches he owned over the years. From those early days, I remember a very hot red Camaro RS SS and an amply powered fastback Plymouth Barracuda. I thought my friend was the luckiest son in the world, because he got to drive many of these hot cars. Bob Sr. also loved boats, but he was a sailor and his son and I are both motor boaters. This was a constant source of contention, because everyone knows sailors and “stink-potters” don’t see eye to eye. To attend a boat show with Big Bob and Bob Jr. was interesting.

When we were kids, all the families in our Buffalo neighborhood knew each other, and many of them socialized. Buffalo was, in my opinion, a great party town, and our parents were great mentors in the art of celebration. One thing I distinctly remember about Big Bob in the early days was his propensity to wear the most garish, ridiculous pants, sporting bizarre designs. It seemed like the mission was to find the most outrageous color combinations and designs to establish oneself as the life of the party (or the person with the worst taste in clothing).

As I did, my friend Bob Jr. eventually went into the family business, and he worked for his father for many years. I can’t speak for my friend, but I can say that working for my father was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. While I hated the real estate business, I valued the lessons learned by watching my father conduct business. I saw a different side of my dad as a businessman, and I learned a lot about life from him in this environment. I suspect Bob Jr. would say the same about his dad.

Now, my friend and I are in our 60s and we have both had the experience of watching our fathers slowly fade away. Big Bob had passed the nonagenarian mark before he passed, and my dad died just short of his 99^th birthday. It is a strange thing to watch your parents age, because they become exponentially more “mortal” as time passes. I always relied on my parents for emotional support and guidance, but near the end, I was charged with taking care of them. I never really did let go of the notion that my mom and dad were bigger than life. Then they died. No matter when that happens in life, when you’ve had good parents, it is a shock.

Last Saturday, Bob Jr. and I met when he brought me up some dog food supplies which I can only purchase in the States. We met and had lunch together on the waterfront in Burlington,  and we talked about the weird finality of saying farewell to a parent. It is no tragedy to lose one’s parent to old age; in fact we were both blessed to have had our fathers around for as long as we did. Big Bob had physically deteriorated in his last years, as did my dad, but to the end, and also like my dad, he had his wits about him. As my friend Bob said somewhat sadly, it’s strange to think that he will never have another phone call with his dad again, never sit down and have a meal with him, never be able to rely on his advice. Even stranger, now we are the adults. While none of our parents are or were perfect, they shaped us into the people we become, and regardless of their faults, my parents and most of my friends’ parents did a pretty good job keeping us on the straight and narrow.

I inherited a necktie from my dad when he died, and on it was the repeating design of little exhibitionist opening his raincoat. If I can find it, I think I’ll wear it to the funeral ceremony. I’m pretty sure Big Bob would approve.

   

            - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report - 4/16/18

Sean Cotton Live At Hunters Bay Radio 4/12/18

Last Thursday night, local musician, producer, singer / songwriter, Sean Cotton took the Home Depot stage to perform on the Hunters Bay Radio “Live Drive” show, hosted by my friend “Silver Lake” Joe Thompson. I don’t get out to see live music as often as I’d like, but I am fortunate to attend a live concert almost every Thursday night before my “Lyrical Workers” show. Sean is one of the first musicians with whom I made contact when I moved up here. Four or five years after we first met, we’ve finally recorded some of my songs together. He’s a good producer, and recently, “Mend”, one of the three songs we produced together, is currently climbing the Hunters Bay Radio Top 20 chart.

Sean moved up to this area shortly before Shauna and I did. For twenty years he had been in a successful band known as The Undesirables, co-writing with the very talented Toronto writer, Corin Raymond. Eventually, Sean elected to give up the road in favor of his family. Anybody who  has ever fantasized about being on the road with a band has probably not lived that “dream”. I know plenty of excellent musicians out there busting their humps touring, and the job is not all it’s cracked up to be. Unless you’re very successful, which few are, with a crew, a manager, a booking agent, etc., you’re likely driving yourself to gigs, loading your own equipment in and out, and playing a lot of under-attended venues and bar dates wherein people are not listening to your music. All the while you are dealing with the soul-sucking life of a touring musician.  

Sadly, I think the music business is only getting harder, and about the only way for and artist to succeed is to tour constantly, or to be fortunate enough to place original songs in movies or television. Digital platforms like Spotify and ITunes do not fairly compensate artists for their recordings, and for the vast majority of artists, the process of performing original music is not a living, but rather a difficult labor of love. This is one of many reasons why I never had the courage to pursue music as a career. Over the years, I may have developed as a songwriter, but I’ve never considered myself a strong performer. I was quickly apprised of the field in which I would be competing, and I did not like my odds. Perhaps I could have eked out a living, but there are many more talented artists out there competing for the same piece of the pie. I once wallpapered a room in my Buffalo apartment with rejection notices from various publishers and labels.

When we first moved up here to the Almaguin Highlands, I figured moving so far north of Toronto would nix any possibility of recognition. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I have achieved more recognition for my song writing up here than I would have ever achieved in a big city. I couldn’t get arrested in Buffalo; no one showed any interest in my songs, and Toronto was simply saturated with talent. Up hear, I found an artist-friendly radio station, music lovers who listen to and appreciate unknown artists, and the respect of my songwriting peers.

After his performance last Thursday night, Sean presented me with a box full of CDs he’d collected over the years, mostly comprised of obscure Canadian artists, many of them from the Toronto area. He thought I might like some of the music to air on my show. Yesterday, as the ice storm raged outside, I took a few hours to sort through some of them, and I previewed about 40-50 songs by various artists. Much of this music was, in my opinion, mediocre, but some of it was really good. I love the hunt. My bar has been raised substantially after 3 years hosting a show about songwriting. One CD I played really resonated with me. Entitled “Groovy Mondays” it is a compilation of live performances from the Toronto club Holy Joe’s. Every song on the CD is a winner, and I was only familiar with two of the nineteen artists. 

With all the chatter in my head, it’s getting harder and harder to really listen, to music, to family members, to people who are wiser or more talented than I. Listening to the above-mentioned live album reminded me why I love music so much, and it was a lovely, peaceful moment in an otherwise lousy week. I love  hearing something so fresh and beautiful that it takes me by surprise. Thanks to all the artists out there who have written wonderful songs but who have perhaps not reached their audience. Yet. Talent and recognition rarely go hand in hand. I choose to gauge success by the former not the latter. To all those talented artists out there scraping to make ends meet, keep writing your songs, you never know who is listening. Your songs may outlive the myopic public to whom you present them.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 4/9/18

The other day, during an interview with Hunters Bay Radio host Matt Allen, author Peter Jennings was discussing a book he wrote about happiness. Jennings suggested that happiness is getting harder to achieve these days because of the current high level of stress in our society. In part, he seemed to be attributing this to a disconnect in our eroding personal relationships. I’ll extrapolate from this observation and suggest that we are losing our people skills because we favor electronic communication over face to face interaction. This in turn leads to an erosion of the sense of community.

How many times has it happened to you; you’re trying to explain something complicated to someone by text message, a message that might take one minute in a face to face conversation takes fifteen minutes on the phone (with auto correct, maybe longer!). More and more we seem to be failing to connect, to understand each other. People communicate by phone from opposite ends of the same room. We are fast becoming a society that would rather not interact face to face, or at least by speaking to each other, and I think this is a sad development. In the past week alone I can remember five different instances wherein a Facebook “discussion” degenerated into a disrespectful exchange of insults and personal attacks. We used to call it “flaming” in the early days, email correspondences that were designed to be hurtful and inflammatory. I wonder if people would be so insulting if they were in a face to face conversation. We’ve forgotten how to discuss controversial subjects with respect. We are losing our emotional maturity.   

Not only are nasty remarks in social media hurtful and destructive, they are often irreversible. Someone once said something to me which is indelibly etched in my mind ever since: we are the owner of our thoughts, but the slave to our words. I’ve said many things I later wished I could take back, but if it’s in print it’s even worse. Add to this the amount of disinformation churning around the internet, and the likelihood the truth will be compromised increases markedly. As we become more disconnected, and as the news we absorb, in its various degrees of legitimacy, chips away at our sense of control, it’s no wonder we find it harder to find happiness. In fact, much of what I glean from the internet and from the various news feeds I consult, contributes to my loss of faith in mankind.

The reason I so avidly support our local community radio station in Huntsville is that it makes me happy. It makes me happy to broadcast 36 of my unusual song choices once a week, it makes me happy to promote talented artists I don’t think are receiving the recognition they deserve, it makes me happy to in some small way connect with the people around me. Maybe I’m not reaching all that many people, and I can’t gauge that, but if I reach and entertain a few, that is something. Because of this little radio station, I’ve met a lot of people in this local area, and I feel a little bit more connected to the people around me. By supporting HBR I’m supporting a network of volunteers who through their services do some good for the larger community. I think goodwill is contagious. In a small community, there are palpable rewards, as well as consequences for our words and actions. Next time you’re tempted to respond angrily to a tweet, or post, or email, count to ten, and perhaps you’ll come up with a more constructive response. Perhaps your random act of kindness for the day is simply to turn a negative dialogue into a positive one. Choose your words well; try to do more good than harm. You might just find that this will make you feel better about yourself, and in turn will benefit the world around you. Just a thought.

             - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 4/2/18

Happy Easter to all my gentile friends, and Happy Passover to the members of my tribe. Because it is Easter Monday, and you are probably all by now recovering from your big Easter Sunday feasts, I think now is a fitting time to reprise my rabbit lab story. Forgive me if you’ve read it before, but with reference to a report I wrote a few weeks ago about the balance of nature, it recounts one of the more important lessons I learned in high school, and one of the few I still remember. Sit back and read about the time I killed a bunny.

In Grade 11 I took a science class called “Man In Nature”. It was taught by a man named Neil Currie, and Neil was at the time an active member of The Sierra Club. Judgmental punk that I was, I thought old Neil was a bit of a nerd, uncool because he was an avid bird watcher and a nature lover. While I and my scofflaw friends were out playing hooky, up to no good on a nearby golf course, we’d sometimes see Mr. Currie, dressed up in his khaki shorts and knee-high socks, sporting his Tilley hat, with his binoculars around his neck, observing the many species of birds on campus. What a geek.

One day in class, Neil began to discuss man’s carnivorous nature, and he suggested that most of us had become detached from the process of obtaining meat. Show of hands, how many of us eat meat? How many of us had ever watched meat being butchered? How many of us had ever killed an animal ourselves then skinned and ate it? His point was that we were a society of carnivores who was becoming further and further detached from the harsh reality of killing and eating our prey. Suddenly Neil wasn’t the geek wearing the Tilley hat anymore. He had lived in the wild, in conditions that I would describe as extreme camping, and he had a much clearer understanding of the laws of Nature than we did. Finally, he moved in for the close, which none of us saw coming. How many of us would agree to kill, butcher, and eat a rabbit, as an “experiment” in re-connecting with our inner carnivore? He rather ingeniously persuaded us to agree, and while no one was forced to participate in the experiment, almost everyone signed on for what would ultimately be a life-changing experience.

A week or so later, we the participants gathered outside the science building, and a man showed up, a rabbit farmer, to instruct us in the proper way to kill and butcher a rabbit. He wasted no time. From a cage full of rabbits, he reached in and grabbed one by the hind legs and, with what looked like a police baton, struck it on the head with great force. The rabbit shuddered for a moment and then, in an instant it was dead. Before we could react to what we had just seen, the man pulled out a butcher’s knife, cut off its head, and began to skin and butcher the dead animal. The whole process took maybe 3 minutes, and by the time it was all through, most of us were speechless. We were then called upon to form teams of two and to repeat what we had just observed. Now that it was getting real, a few more people lost their nerve and backed out, but I and most of the class participated.

I will not recount the chaos which ensued, but let it suffice to say that some of us are more successful at bunny butchering than others. In the end though, and in some cases with the assistance of the expert, we all managed to kill, skin, and butcher our rabbits. It was life-changing for me.Some of you reading this will ask yourselves what kind of a crazy, irresponsible teacher would encourage such a traumatic experience for his young and impressionable students. I am quite certain that this kind of learning experience would never be condoned by school authorities today, but things were a little different in 1973. In retrospect, I think what Neil did was brilliant. This science lab taught me a lot more than I would have ever learned from dissecting a frog. Anybody who was brought up on a farm, or who lived in a family of hunters would not be shocked or appalled by what we did, but this experience was monumental for a bunch of spoiled, jaded city kids who thought meat magically appeared in supermarket shelves. It was one of the most important lessons I’ve learned to date.

A week or so later, we had a barbecue at Neil Currie’s house, and you guessed it, rabbit was the main course. It was delicious, and there was a certain closure involved in eating the animals we had killed and butchered. I never want to do it again, anymore than I ever again want to rebuild the engine in a 1967 Triumph Spitfire, which I once did. Once was enough, but the lesson was learned. I think about that rabbit lab almost every time I browse the meat counter in a supermarket, and I now have a healthier understanding of the process of butchering meat. I am also more acutely aware of and sensitive to the ways in which man traumatizes and abuses animals.

There are many reasons why people become vegetarians. For some people meat is too expensive, others find it hard to digest. Some vegetarians simply object to killing any animals for food. I understand that, and I respect their choice. Having been through the process of killing and eating my own animal, I remain a carnivore. Because of that rabbit lab, I am perhaps a little more connected to the process. I think there are a few hypocrites among the militant animal rights zealots, because there are many ways we contribute to the death of animals other than by eating them. We wear leather shoes and other leather clothing, and animal by-products are used in a large variety of products that people use. I am now perhaps a little more mindful of my place in the food chain. Mother Nature takes no prisoners, and for me it is important to have some kind of understanding of my place in the natural world. In my opinion, we as a species are going in the wrong direction where this is concerned, and our ignorance of and disregard for the laws of nature will haunt us.

A girl friend of mine, who is a holistic medicine practitioner by profession, responded to an article I wrote recently about songwriter Jon Brooks, and more specifically about his album of murder anthems. She commented somewhat cynically that “we kill everything in the end”. I killed a rabbit once, and it changed my life.

  - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED