The Oppenheimer Report - 2/27/12

We’re still down in Buffalo cleaning out my parents’ house. I learned a new meaning for a word today. I’ve heard the verb “to crow” used to describe a certain kind of utterance. “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!” he crowed. The other day, while down in Buffalo I noticed a convergence of the ubiquitous black birds flocking to the trees surrounding our house. There were hundreds of them. I thought it was strange, but it’s not the first time I’ve seen this. It never occurred to me that perhaps they were out for revenge. My black car was parked in the driveway, and when I went out to put it in the garage, I found that it had been “crowed” from hood to bumper. I think every crow in the trees around our house decided to crap on my car. It was Monty Python-esque … as if someone had poured buckets of off white paint over the top of my car. Absolutely deeees-gusting. Remember those seagull attacks I spoke of last summer? Then we have the flying squirrels screwing right in front of Shauna and me, looking us directly in the eye. And now, the crows perform this guano mob hit on my car. What is it with me and the critters? Did I somehow heinously offend some higher up in the animal kingdom in this or a past life, and now this is my payback? Crows are allegedly smart birds, so I have to believe that this was pre-meditated.

We’re about a quarter of the way through the daunting task of cleaning out my parent’s house. Soon there will be an estate sale, probably some time in late March, and while my sister and I have fairly well established what each of us wanted from the house, there are 54 years of memories to pore through. I found an old photograph I’d never seen before. It looks as if it was taken by a professional, and it is of four women representing four generations of Dad's side of the family: my father’s sister, her first daughter, Dad's mother, and her mother. I’d never seen a photo of Dad’s maternal grandmother before. It took Shauna several weeks to go through all the stuff in her aunt’s apartment before we cleaned it out and returned to the landlord “broom clean.” Our house is about five times as large as that apartment, and every closet and cabinet is full of memories. While working in Dad’s dressing room, I found a storage compartment I’d never noticed high above a built in chest of drawers. In it I found an old yellowed newspaper, a copy of The Buffalo Evening News, and it looked as if it had never been opened up. It was dated November 22, 1963 and the headline read “ Kennedy Dead, Shot By Sniper in Texas.” Dad probably put it up there as a sort of time capsule, and that is just the kind of thing my father might do, knowing that that paper would likely be found by the person cleaning out the house after he was gone. It was only visible from a step ladder.

I had a long talk with an old friend the other day who just happened to be visiting Buffalo at the same time we were there, and we got on the subject of the teachings of Dr. John Sarno and the mind-body connection. This friend has had a tough time over the past several years, suffering from a constellation of painful illnesses, and he has wrestled with the subsequent depression that often accompanies pain. Shauna has been struggling with chronic pain for almost as long as I’ve know her, and the subject resonated with me. Pain is the body’s messenger; it warns us when we need to address a trauma. More and more frequently I’m seeing people suffering from auto-immune related illnesses, or suffering from pain that is not being treated effectively with conventional medicine. Like so many other illnesses, we address the symptoms but not the root causes. I look on helplessly as my wife suffers terribly from what has been diagnosed as Fibromyalgia (FMS) and Chronic Myofacial Pain (CMP). Dr. Sarno categorized Fibromyalgia as a subset of a wider set of ailments he refers to as TMS. His theory is basically that this cornucopia of ailments has its origins in the brain. Of course all pain is referred from the brain, but his unconventional theory is that these mysterious illnesses are an attempt by the brain to protect us from some unacceptable truth. That’s an huge oversimplification, and to tell a pain sufferer that his or her pain is psychosomatic is not helpful. Still Sarno has had some notable success at treating chronic pain sufferers, and I think his theories are worth examining. That said, I do not understand why so many of us are getting sick this way. Perhaps it’s environmental, or perhaps we are simply not coping with our increasingly complex society. Maybe, like those polemic aliens in War of the Worlds, we the “superior” species have advanced technologically, only to be destroyed by the something simple for which we were simply unprepared. Food for thought.



Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED