The Oppenheimer Report - 7/11/11

Fourth of July weekend I was called down to Buffalo unexpectedly to attend the funeral of my Aunt Bobbi. She wasn’t really my aunt, more of a distant relative, but she might as well have been. She and her brother lived with my maternal grandparents after their parents died prematurely. I saw her and her family a lot when I was younger, but not so frequently over the past 35 years. Bobbi was big on family, and she was always very generous and kind to me and to Shauna. At the reception after the funeral, there was a collage of old photos of Bobbi and the extended Lewin family, and each picture spoke volumes. Of late I have been surrounded, sometimes overwhelmed, by the complications inherent in dealing with my aging loved ones. My dad passed a few years ago, Mom is very old and sick, we just spent a year caring for one of Shauna’s elderly aunts who passed last year, and Shauna’s parents are now in their upper eighties. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past five years dealing with nursing care, medical emergencies, hospital beds, walkers, wheelchairs, searching for the ultimate adult diaper, and the odd behavior that so often accompanies my octogenarian and nonagenarian charges. For the past five or ten years, Bobbi had been sick, and most of the time near the end she was confined to a wheelchair equipped with an oxygen tank. I looked at those pictures at her funeral and was reminded of the woman who had lived a full life, complete with all the travel, family drama, joy, heartbreak, and laughter most of us experience. She and her brother Morry were great story tellers, and they told me tales about my grandmother and grandfather that I never heard from my Mom. That oral history, embellished as it was, gave me a little more perspective on the people my grandparents were. I never knew my maternal grandmother and my grandfather died when I was three . To my mother they were saints, but to Bobbi and Morry, they were fallible human beings. Somewhere between my mom’s recollections and the stories from Bobbi and Morry, I got a clearer picture of who my grandparents were. In my collection of family photographs I recall one picture of Bobbi as a young woman lying on the Lake Erie beach with some of her pals. I think of all the parties and good times I had on that same stretch of sand. Four generations of my family grew up at that beach house. Like my discussion several months ago about the passing of some high school classmates, this death kind of shook me up. A hundred Kodachrome moments came flooding through my head; ancient history in color and black and white. My father as a younger man, wearing his Stetson cowboy hat, sitting on his horse, overlooking Palm Springs in the early1960s. My sister as a pudgy little girl playing in the sand with her infant brother (my ears were as big then as they are now). Me sitting in a giant tea cup at Disneyland, back when there was only one Disneyland. I guess with each passing of an old relative, and with the premature passing of some of my peers, I’m spending a little more time contemplating the past rather than the present and future. Bobbi is one more person gone who played an unforgettable role in my development. This past week I have taken it upon myself to contact a few of my relatives and send them old pictures from our family photo album which pertain to them. I guess it’s my way of staying connected to what little family I have left. I leave you this week with a song I wrote several years ago…

                                     Scrapbook

You’re in the kitchen brewing coffee, the aroma fills the air
Morning sunlight through the window filters through your hair
The dog is at the window, watching for the squirrels
And everything is perfect in our little world.

Cho:
And I just want this moment to survive all my life
Something to hold onto every day of my life
To carry me through all those trying times
To capture the contentment in the scrapbook of my mind.

That’s me down by the water playing in the sand
Grampy’s in his lounge chair the king of all the land
Mom and Dad and barbecues, the smell of fresh cut grass
Just a summer day on Thunder Bay, I wish that it would last

Cho: repeat

Bridge:

These days I find it difficult to keep my spirits high
Surrounded by the foul rag and bone shop of my life
I fall into a dark hole when I ask the question why?
Memories of past contentment help me to get by.

We’re at the table sipping coffee, silence fills the room
Out on the lake we hear the calling of a distant loon
And when our life turns difficult, as it will someday soon
I’ll open up my scrapbook to this sunny afternoon

Cho: repeat


Here’s to remembering all the sunny afternoons.