MikeyOpp.com

I don’t know much about love, or relationships for that matter. I’m not even sure how I ended up with my hopelessly romantic outlook on dating and love, I only know that it must have been some strange combination of films I’ve seen, books I’ve read, dreams I’ve had, and real life situations that I’ve witnessed. But I do know one thing for certain; if I can ever attain the sort of relationship that my parents have with each other, then I’ll be a very happy man. I’ve been thinking about my parents’ marriage all week, because my parents are celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I’m twenty-five years old. This means that my parents have been sharing the same bed, sharing decisions, and sharing their lives for five years longer than I’ve even been breathing oxygen here on Earth – to me, this provides some awesome perspective.

My brother, Sam, the older, more sophisticated, “I attended Dad’s alma mater at Columbia University-and-have-a-real-job” one, he already gave my parents an anniversary gift. Sam is a teacher by day, and a photographer by night, weekend, and vacation. He’s very talented, and has had his work featured in several different galleries in a few different states. You can check out his work at www.samoppenheim.com. Yeah, I know, where in the world did he come up with that address, right? At any rate, for our parents’ anniversary, much to their pleasure, and surprise, he gave them a beautiful large photograph that he took in India – one of a kind. So great, that leaves me, the ancillary son, ‘old chopped liver Mikey’ without a gift, and with time running out. The ‘rents are already tanning themselves on foreign, deliciously warm shores, leaving me without an address to send a gift to. But this week, in the middle of the night, an idea suddenly struck me; my brother can give my parents the gift of his keen aestheticism, but I can give them something else; the gift of kind, thankful words. So this week my column is a tribute to one of the most bizarre, no-method-to-their-madness marriages that I’ve ever had the privilege to witness. Please join me as I explain how my parents keep me inspired and hopeful that I will someday find the perfect co-pilot to tour the world with…

My Dad’s from Boston and my Mom is from Tampa. This means that Dad drives like a he’s a felon on the run, with a line of police cars behind him, he pronounces words like ‘card’ by saying cod, and he doesn’t believe that any law can force him to wear a seatbelt. On the other hand, my Mom starts shivering when the temperature drops below 75 degrees, she fears everything, because she grew up ducking under her desk for ‘nuclear war drills’, but she also understands the pseudo importance that a man can attach to a sporting events’ outcome. This perfect match met on a blind date, in Florida, when they were each about twenty-six years old. Dad was in Florida finishing his Law School applications, and trying to make a living as a professional gambler. Mom was a retired schoolteacher, and working as a ‘telewager girl’ at a Jai Alai bar. According to my father, he courted Mom the same way I plan on courting my future wife; by drinking vodka and hanging out at bars, reading good books together, and then finally convincing her to go to Europe with him for a few months. Of course, for all I know, things worked out the other way around, and Mom convinced Dad to travel with her. It was, after all, the seventies, meaning that feminism had certainly begun to rear its beautiful head.

At any rate, after a successful trip abroad, Dad was all set to enter law school at NYU in NYC, and Mom agreed to move up to the city and live with him. And the rest was history; they were married within three years of meeting each other, and had their first of two children about two years after their marriage. By thirty-three, they’d had their second and final kid, me, and so naturally, Dad figured that would be a good time to quit his law practice and move the family down to Florida where he could resume gambling on greyhound dog races. At this point, you may be thinking “what kind of family man quits a successful steady job right after the birth of his second son, and moves the family one thousand miles south in order to resume risking all of his money in the highly unpredictable field of gambling?” And furthermore, “what kind of mother stands by a man who makes these sorts of decisions?” Well, I’ll tell you who, the kind of people who want their kids to grow up believing that life is an empty canvas, and you don’t have to play by the social rules and norms in order to experience a good life.

But marriage isn’t easy, and I can remember, when growing up that I’d be downstairs sometimes, trying to pretend that I was doing homework while really watching Married With Children, or some other incredibly intellectual sit-com, when I’d hear a monstrous roar from up stairs, followed by a shrill squeal, only to be retorted by another ‘lion’s’ roar. This pattern would continue like a Grateful Dead “call and return” solo between two instruments, until suddenly, the noises would stop. This strange music was actually the sound of my parents fighting, Dad roars, and Mom shrills. At the time, I thought that because their emotions were so volatile, that this meant that they hated one another, and that they were going to get a divorce, like all the other kids’ parents at school. But they never did, because within minutes of fighting like this, they’d resolve the argument, and then they’d be happy as ever, and talking about plans to visit someone, or go into the city with guests from out of town. So it seems to me that the couples who fight occasionally, and don’t hide their frustrations from one another seem to be the couples who last, whereas people who are more concerned with their children or other people’s perceptions of their relationship, people who quell their anger and hide their frustrations, these seem to be the divorcees. So even though you scared the crap out of me many times; way to go, Dad and Mom, you guys obviously kind of sort of almost knew what you were doing.

I’ll never forget some of the dos and don’ts that my Dad taught me during some of my formative years. For example, at a young age, I learned from his example that women, in general, don’t like to be tricked or scared. Our family was vacationing in Yosemite National Park when my Dad told my family that he’d left something behind, and he’d meet us back at the cabin. So Mom, Sam and I showed up to our dark cabin, in the dead, dark night that only a national park provides. My mom entered first, and went to hang up her coat, when I heard her shriek in a manner I’d only heard actresses do in the horror films my brother and I frequently watched. I ran in after her, only to discover that Dad had been hiding in the closet, and had growled like a bear when my mom opened the door. I’ll never forget the sight of my panic stricken mother weeping and holding her hand over her heart for ten solid minutes, while simultaneously cursing at my Father and making him promise to never, ever scare her again. The moral of the story is that while my Mother is indeed a total wuss, and scared of her own shadow, Dad knew this, and so it wasn’t funny of him to use this fact against her for his own amusement.

But my Dad is also full of spontaneous surprises, like the ring he bought my mother for their 25th wedding anniversary that he hid in a book. He gave her the book as a gift, and waited for her to open the book, while my Mother thought to herself that she had been mistaken in marrying a man who would get her some stupid book as the only reminder of their quarter of a century of matrimony. She was quite floored however, when she finally realized that she had been had. Mom often wears this ring—and to me, it is an appropriate and powerful symbol of a man’s undying love for his wife, given to her 25 years after originally vowing to love her and take care of her until the day he died.

One time, after breaking up with a girlfriend, I asked my Mom how she ‘knew’ that Dad was the right one for her. She smiled, and told me that when she first met my father, she didn’t hear any whistles or bells, and she didn’t think that her dates with him were going to lead to anything more than a fling. “But then,” she recalled, “things just got better every day. He became my best friend, as well as my lover, and I knew that I could spend the rest of my life with him.” When I try to describe my parents’ relationship to other people, I find it apt to succinctly paraphrase my mother’s own words, and refer to them as “friends in love.” Because they share like friends, talk like friends, and even fight like friends, but in the end, the reason they are still together, and most likely always will be, is because they recognize their friendship, and this mutual respect for one another has created a perfectly symbiotic relationship. Of course I am most proud of my parents for consecrating said friendship by having sex exactly two times, once in the end of 1978, and one final, perfect time, in the fall of 1980, when they created their favorite zygote.

My parents exchanged vows thirty years ago, on December 6th, 1976. And I have discovered a lot of ominous signs that their marriage truly was ‘written in the stars.’ After all, there were a lot of parallels between my parents’ marriage and the major events of 1976. For example, three great dictators appeared that year. In Cambodia, Pol Pot, of the Khmer Rouge seized power, and meanwhile, in New York City, the future dictators of the Oppenheim family unit; also known as “my parents,” married one another, thereby creating our family’s bi-monarchial dictatorship. And in 1976, not only did my parents make the landmark decision to marry one another, but The Supreme Court also made their own landmark decision, ruling that the death penalty is not inherently cruel or unusual and is a constitutionally acceptable form of punishment. Lucky for me, my parents agreed that spanking and the occasional ‘grounding’ were the highest forms of capital punishment to be used in our household. Even more strange is that unbeknownst to my parents then, the winner of the Super Bowl that year was the future favorite team of their second to be born son (the Pittsburgh Steelers) – do you believe in fate, or what! And the stars were certainly aligned in favor of my Dad that year, for he’s an iconoclastic Boston Red Sox fan, meaning that he is as much a fan of the Red Sox as he is an avid hater of the Yankees, who were swept by the Reds in the World Series that same year!

Need more proof? How about this; In 1976, The Grammy’s awarded “song of the year” to “Love Will Keep Us Together,” which is certainly true about my parents’ relationship, and the “album of the year” was “Still Crazy After All These Years,” by Paul Simon, which is another apt way to describe not only my parents’ marriage, but also the two of them, as individuals. And if you don’t think that’s enough of a coincidence, then how about this: the Academy Awards gave the best picture award that year to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which is just about the best title that anyone could come up with for my family’s autobiography (Second place would have to go to “The God’s Must be Crazy”.). At any rate, 1976 was a crazy year, a year in which a peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, was elected President of the United States, proving that anything is possible, up to and including my parents finding each other, falling in love, and somehow managing to nurture that love to the point where it still survives, intact, today! Whenever I wanted something as a kid, and my parents were not going to cave in and give me whatever it was that I was demanding at the time, my mother would taunt me by singing “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by the Rolling Stones. To this day, when I call her cell phone, she has chosen this song as her ring tone for me (you’re sick and twisted, Mom!). But at this time of great parental reverence, instead of being bitter, I’ve become aware of the irony in these lyrics, Mom, because your marriage with Dad has succeeded, in part, because you each have followed Mick’s advice, and when times got rough, you have each remembered that “if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”