The Oppenheimer Report 10/28/19

The grim, gray dampness of October has settled in over this area like a big, soggy blanket. All the docks (except ours) are out of the water, the seasonal cottagers have all gone home, the days are growing shorter, and soon, the summer-swelled streets of Huntsville will be empty by 7pm. A palpable sense of gloom is evident on the faces of my local friends. It was a decidedly beautiful fall, and the colors were spectacular surrounding our lake, but now, we’re into the rusty, oppressive limbo of late October. With a couple of good windstorms, the trees will be stripped of their last remaining leaves, and then it’s just a matter of time before Jack Frost puts the hammer down. Some of my neighbors at higher elevations have already reported a little snow. Thankfully, we haven’t had anything like the early winter storms that have already begun to plague the west. A friend of ours who just retired as a municipal snowplow operator around Banff National Park, told me that his last winter was brutal. Somebody informed me that the preponderance of spiders here in Ontario this season is a portent for a severe winter, but I’m not quite sure wherein lies the science behind that prediction. As a little cosmic kick in our asses, our pump, which draws our water from the lake, is slowly failing and may need to be replaced. Great timing, right? Our plumber said, sarcastically: “So I guess you’re goin’ swimmin’.”

As a former resident of Western New York, I have a black belt in complaining about winter. Buffalo winters are typically nasty, not so much because of the copious amounts of snowfall, which are more of a problem south of the city, but because, situated on the east end of Lake Erie as it is, Buffalo doesn’t see much sunlight from October until May. Many people in that area suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a very real problem  that I suspect is prevalent up here as well. Two of my favorite winter activities are walking on the frozen lake and skating on the Arrowhead Provincial Park skating trail. It is this interim stage that bothers me. Within the next month, I will likely take my last ride in the Porta-Bote. I have kept it in the water realizing that it may be required for pump removal. Someday soon, I will take the obligatory, annual “where IS everyone?!” photo, while I drift out on the lake. Slowly, the denial is wearing off, and I have recently acknowledged that the flowers need to be removed from the garden. That’s a start. One thing for which I was not prepared: last week, I was walking through Canadian Tire and I noticed that several aisles were already full of Christmas decorations. Really?! Has the starting gun already sounded for that retail madness? Can we not agree that we will wait until AFTER Halloween before we start flogging tinsel?

Have you noticed that I’m grumpy today? After I growled at Shauna yesterday, we jokingly made a wager to see who can be civil the longest over the next week. The loser will likely foot the bill for a dinner out, while the winner will gloat. All day today we’ve been sarcastically referring to each other as “Honeybunch” and “Lover-bumps”, grinning all the while in a clearly insincere fashion. Well, it could be a very long week.

Finally, the most recent big news story is that “Big Daddy” Baghdadi, now ex-leader of ISIS, is dead. Much is being made of this, but I think combating terrorism is a little like a Whac-A-Mole game. International terrorism gets a lot of press, eclipsing many other problems. Frankly, I’m a little more concerned about the Pandora’s Box of angry young white men in North America. They seem to be the bigger threat.

Happy Halloween everyone. As always, I will be phoning it in with a tube of fake blood and some plastic fangs, but I do have some good Halloween songs for this week’s Lyrical Workers Show.

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 feature of #HuntersBayRadio, The Bay 88.7FM.

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