The Work

Saturday afternoons when I accompanied my father on his weekend errands, he would dial the dashboard radio to broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera where a man with a mid-Atlantic accent explained the grief of human calamity set to song. When traffic snarled and a soprano lamented how she gave her life to art while her lover was tortured just off stage, my father would stare at the long avenues ahead, and one day he told me he’d taken singing lessons but the road did not go where he had hoped and fate always plays a hand in what we are, though we sing when no one listens about how it could be different.