The Oppenheimer Report 7/22/19

About a year ago I got an unusual request from an old friend of mine, someone with whom I’d grown up in Buffalo. He wrote me to inform me that one of our old classmates, a friend named Willard Uncapher, was very ill and undergoing treatment for brain cancer. He asked me if I had any healing music that I might want to add to a list of songs he was compiling for Willard. I sent a few songs on and shortly thereafter wrote Willard as well. I’d lost touch with him over the years, but on occasion, we’d been in contact by email or Facebook. My last message from him was around November of last year, and it was one of those brief exchanges, a Thanksgiving greeting and the mutual wish for good health. However brief, those short messages were a comforting connection for me to someone whom I knew to be a good soul. The other day, I received word that Willard had passed on, and the news hit me hard. I wasn’t present in his life to follow his struggle. Knowing Willard, and reading the post his daughter and primary caregiver put up to announce his death, I don’t doubt that he had faced his journey with dignity, grace, and courage. Willard was quite different from my other classmates in school. I am so very thankful that we got to know each other better when we were young adults. It was then that I came to realize what a kind, gentle and loving soul he was. I can’t say I knew him very well, but I am a better person for having had him in my life.

About a year ago, around the same time I heard that Willard was sick, I came across an old photograph of me as a little boy. Sometimes, when I find old photos that are not in an album, I paste them into one of my song notebooks, perhaps for inspiration. I can’t seem to throw out old photographs, though lately I’m beginning to wonder why I keep them. That photo is etched in my mind, because I was looking at it when I got the news Willard had passed. I was perhaps three years-old when the photo in question was taken at our beach house on Lake Erie. I was sitting in my very first boat, a tiny little red wooden boat that my grandfather gave to me. The boat was filled with water (a metaphor for my journey?). I look at the child in that picture and can’t believe that almost 61 years have passed since it was taken. Now, so many of my friends, have died before their time. A girlfriend with whom I was close died at sixteen, taken by Hodgkin’s Disease, a friend from boarding school was killed in a car crash shortly after we graduated, and an alarming number of other peers have fallen, especially in the past ten years. For some it was misadventure, for some it was genetics, but for some it was simply their time to die. As much as I search for meaning in all of this, I have found none. The only thing I can glean from all this loss is that it reinforces my resolve to assess the journey as I take it. I know Willard had a rich life, because I knew Willard, and that in turn gives me something for which to strive. His was a life well-lived, and I think I owe it to people like him to make the most of mine.

I wrote a song, perhaps 30 years ago entitled “Curse Of The Sea”, and it is about the unbridled anxiousness I felt at the time. It was a somewhat preachy, pseudo-intellectual examination of the existential questions many of us ask ourselves. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I dreamed I was somewhere else. I still have those feelings from time to time, and sometimes wonder what I am doing or could be doing to improve my life, or the lives of others. I can’t say I have figured this out yet, but the older I get, the less I worry about it. Meanwhile, I rush through time’s rapids, and no matter what course I take, there are rocks and snags everywhere. My contentment seems to come with the moments when I acknowledge my lack of control. People come and go in my life; I still have dozens of answering machine messages from ghosts. And then there are the photographs. There are good, positive lessons to be learned everywhere, from the people I meet, and from Mother Nature. I think I’m beginning to pay closer attention. Sometimes those prophets of love and understanding are alive, sometimes the voices are from the hereafter. Regardless, I will live out the second half of my life with the comforting notion that there is something good to be learned from all the souls that have touched me. Willard, I am grateful to have known you in life, and I am starting to believe we’ll catch up with each other again someday. 

"I read a story about a maiden
Who lived by the sea
She used to stare out of a big bay window
Longing for what would never be.

Infatuation
No destination
No reservations
It's just the curse of the sea."

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer ©2019
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
jamieoppenheimersongwriter@gmail.com

Jamie Oppenheimer, Songwriter, Author, Blogger, Radio Producer, & Host has been writing THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT every MONDAY since 1992 and has published the articles on his blog since 2006. We are including Jamie's weekly reports, as a new feature of #HuntersBayRadio, The Bay 88.7FM.
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