The Oppenheimer Report 5/9/16

I wish all my readers a belated Happy Mother’s Day! I miss mine but I can’t complain. I had my mom for 93 years and, until the very end, she was a fascinating woman. We all have mothers, or had them, but do we really know them as well as we think we do? Of course some people never get to know their mothers at all, and some mothers are not worth knowing. For the rest of us though, we know them as their children know them, but I wonder what their lives were like before they had us. Do we know that person? I came upon a photograph years ago when I was cleaning out my parents’ house to be sold, and it was of my mom and dad shortly after they were married. They both looked a little giddy, with big grins on their faces, maybe even a bit tipsy from alcohol, and Mom is sitting in Dad’s lap. I remember asking Mom about the photo before she died. She’d been through a bad marriage before my father came along, and she was raising two young girls by herself. There is so much to that photo, so much I will never know about my mother.

In many ways, my mom led a charmed life as a child. My grandfather was a community leader in Buffalo, as well as a wealthy, very successful businessman, and owner and CEO of The Wildroot Company, Inc. The Lehman family had a house in Buffalo and a beach house in Fort Erie, Ontario. That is the house I recently sold, and in many ways that house embodies the spirit of my mom. She grew up there, had parties with her friends there; sowed her wild oats there. The family had a chauffeur named Tom, and during Prohibition he used to bootleg liquor across the Peace Bridge in the family car. Mom was technically a smuggler as a young girl, though she probably didn’t know it at the time. I look at photos of parties she had on the Lake Erie shoreline, with all her friends laughing and drinking on the beach, and I think about how three generations of my family did the same thing in the same place. I wonder what she was like back then, before life kicked her around the block a few times.

I can only go by the oral history, and by the photos I see in the old albums, but it seemed as if she had great love and happiness in her life as a young lady. Later, after she attended junior college, she moved to New York City and worked as an illustrator for the fashion industry. I’ve seen some of that art and she had talent. She supported herself and lived the life of a swinging single in one of the world’s most exciting cities, but eventually, she gave all that up to marry the wrong guy. She had two girls with that man, and when she divorced him there was a nasty custody battle. Not too long afterwards, she married my dad, who was five or six years her senior, and a long-time friend of the family. Through their union I was born. Shortly thereafter, my eldest sister Joanne was killed in Buffalo when she was hit by a truck as she ran across a busy street. She was thirteen. My mom was devastated, and her life changed a lot in a very short time.

 

I look at a photograph, and knowing all the events that transpired when the shot was taken, I extrapolate beyond the flash of a camera smile. I see the unknown, the mysterious. Perhaps I see things that were not really there, I don’t know. I was very close to my mom, and she was not a shy, introverted person. She was honest with me and she was an excellent role model. Mom was an active and productive member of her community, sat on many boards, was generous with her time and money, and volunteered at a nearby hospital, on the ward that tended to children who had cancer. I just wish I had a clearer vision of her journey. Everyone has a story to tell, a history that explains their journey, if we are present to listen. As the years roll by, and as we log some hard miles on our travelling souls, the journey tempers us. It is tempering me. I know my mom was an interesting, creative, intelligent, woman, and I also know that the circumstances in her life changed her considerably. When I allow myself to be sad - and I rarely indulge myself in that emotion when it comes to my parents - it is because there is so much that, in retrospect, I would have liked to have known. I was too young and self-absorbed when I should have been asking questions.

 

LAUGHING

 

I WAS LOOKING THROUGH SOME SLIDES OF THE 50S AND 60S
BACK WHEN YOU AND MOM WERE IN YOUR HEYDAY
RIDING WESTERN SADDLE IN THE PALM SPRINGS DESERT
LAUGHING AND LOOKING LIKE YOU’D LEARNED TO SEIZE THE DAY

 

BUT CELLULOID IMAGES FROZEN IN TIME HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO LIE

WHAT LURKS BENEATH THE FLASH OF A CAMERA SMILE?
I NEVER KNEW WHAT YOU WERE FEELING, FOR I WAS JUST A BOY
BUT I WONDER ABOUT IT EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE

 

WERE YOU LAUGHING, LAUGHING THROUGH THE PAIN
WHEN YOU LOST HER CLEARLY SOMETHING DIED INSIDE
LAUGHING, LAUGHING, BUT ISN’T IT A SHAME?
I DON’T REALLY SEE YOU BUT I KEEP LOOKING JUST THE SAME

 

THESE DAYS I LOOK AT MY LIFE WITH BEMUSED DETACHMENT
NOTHING TURNED OUT AS I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE
WHAT TELLS REVEAL A SOUL THAT’S GONE ASTRAY
GOALS, AMBITIONS, DREAMS THROWN INTO A ROILING SEA

 

HELPLESS I LOOK FOR MEANING IN THIS FREEZE FRAME REALITY
LOOKING AT PHOTOS OF YOU FOR A GLIMPSE OF ME
YOUR SMILE BELIES THE DISCONTENT YOU TRY TO HIDE
I’M LOOKING AT TWO PEOPLE I COULD NEVER SEE

 

alt verse:

(MAYBE WE ARE ALL PRODUCTS OF OUR MANGLED HISTORY

WE PUT ON SMILES LIKE COSMETICS TO SHADE OUR IDENTITES
BECAUSE OF YOU I’VE NEVER TRUSTED  FACES I SEE
BECAUSE OF YOU I’VE NEVER REALLY LOOKED AT ME.)

 

WRITTEN 3/6/14

 

-Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2016 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED