‘merica

Oh public road. I say I am not afraid to leave you, and yet I love you. You express me better than I can express myself.

— Walt Whitman

When I was much younger, three friends and I got up one morning at 5am, packed the car, grabbed the camera and pillows, and set off on a three-week road trip in a thousands-mile-long oval across the United States. We drove, walked, and talked our way through places like Jackson Hole, Topeka, The Poconos, Morgantown, Scottsdale, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, and Reno. We flew past pancake-flat countryside, red, rolling desert hills, jagged snow-capped mountains, and vast concrete cityscapes.

I had a lot I wanted to say about that trip. It did so much for me, to me. I wanted to talk about the blistering, oppressive heat blowing across the Bonneville Flats. About the abandoned, eerily silent rest stop in eastern Nebraska. The dewy, thick-as-mud air I couldn’t escape from in West Virginia on our third-from-the-last morning of the trip. Watching cowboys herd cattle on horseback in New Mexico. Sticky molasses sunsets in Missouri. Tornadic storms in Wyoming, and again in Eastern Colorado. A Cadillac graveyard in Amarillo. Big horned sheep on the road outside of Denver, and three-hour traffic in Chicago. Fireworks over Des Moines, bright yellow sunflowers in southern Utah, and dynamic and massive explosions as Americans celebrated Independence Day. Sleeping under the stars at a rest stop near the Grand Canyon. Reading and writing and sketching through most of Ohio and Indiana, and standing in the middle of a long, empty desert road — yelling, waiting for my echo to come back — somewhere in Montana. Watching the clouds rotate from the windows of our cheap motel rooms. Long, slow breakfasts before the rest of the world was alive. Obscure, distant radio stations fighting the static in the middle of nowhere. Sailing on gas fumes until the next station seventeen miles ahead. Hail downpours and blinding sun and driving wind and still, dark nights. People and no people. Exhausted and alive. Driving nineteen hours straight through the night on the Loneliest Road in America. Jumping up and down on the side of the road at 2:17am somewhere in the guts of Nevada, trying to keep ourselves awake for the return trip home.

But in wanting to somehow say it more perfectly, I never said it at all. And so what you have here in front of you is all that’s left of it now, years later.

For several weeks, we searched for adventure and absorbed all God's glory in, on, and around the more than 4500 miles of country we covered between Ohio and Nevada. We breached thirteen states, eight or nine mountain ranges, and twelve major highways. We discussed politics, sports, terrorism, and life in general at countless diners, gas stations, rest areas, and dive bars. We made friends with a motorcycle gang in Indianapolis, crashed a wedding reception in Albuquerque, and spent an afternoon on an Arizona reservation belonging to the Pascua Yaqui tribe.

By the time we arrived back at my house, we were exhausted and exhilarated. We unpacked the car, grabbed some cold drinks from the refrigerator, and plopped on the sofa. After a ten-minute silence, the very first comment was, “So, when are we going again?"

shining forth

Long before iPhones and digital cameras, there was film. When you released the shutter to take a photograph, light reacted with the silver-halide particles in the film emulsion. Until the film was developed, it’d be an invisible reaction — and so she floated there, her image captured in darkness.

I make lists to remember.

• She used to sit at the desk next to mine in the darkened lecture theatre as the professor ran images through the slide projector — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian columns, the caryatids of the Erechtheion. Sometimes she’d reach over and draw in the margins of my notebook: spirals reminiscent of Klimt. Eyes. Calculations of how many Drachma she would keep for souvenirs as we traveled through the Greek Islands. In return, I’d scribble cryptic messages, written in the International Phonetic Alphabet we learned in linguistics, when the lecture was dull: | sh ut mi |.

• What we shared.

  A large house that permitted us to live with four of our closest friends. A collage of black and white photographs of faces we’d snapped in the street, each one enlarged and cropped close so that their eyes and cheekbones filled the frame. Meals of pistachios and diet Coke. Cole’s electric kettle we’d fill to make jasmine and camomile tea. A maroon university sweatshirt with a hole in the left sleeve. Michelle’s expansive collection of operas and classical music. Gia’s massive professional video cassette recorder that I simply couldn’t rewind. Bret’s vinyls of Van Morrison. A bicycle pump. A sense of despair, that we had so little time.

  A tiny dent I can still trace on the bridge of my nose, sustained when three of us crashed our bikes head-on as we peddled home from a late-night showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. A scraped knee. A cracked rib. Two hairline fractures in her left arm. I think she called out to us, or we to her, and we each turned in a wide, slow, graceful arc directly towards the other, colliding in the middle of the street. For some inexplicable reason, none of us was able to swerve out of the way. At first, I seemed to be the injured one, with blood pouring out of my nose, and a huge black gash under my chin. She and Cole wheeled the bikes home, he balancing one with each arm, patient as I limped slowly along beside them. Inside, Gia helped me rinse the blood out of my clothes before she insisted I go to bed. As she turned out the lights, she placed one cool hand on my forehead, and it seemed for a moment to still the pain. But she came to me later, in the middle of the night, pulling me out of the dark, out of a dream in which I wandered blindly through a labyrinth, inching forward with arms outstretched, afraid I would smash into a wall — “I think my arm is broken.” No moon that night. Lucid, luminous details return to me, intensified by the constant dull throb of pain in my head and the sudden plunge out of sleep. I can still feel the skin taut on my knee where the blood had dried. I remember the damp grass soaking into my sneakers and a shower of icy raindrops as I tore off a handful of sumac from a hedge outside the house. It must’ve rained in the night, while I slept. We walked along the empty sidewalks, along the paved path that runs through the medical buildings, slipping between the sulfurous pools of light along the way. There were stars overhead, glittering through the bare tree branches. Orion, Cassiopeia. In the emergency room, a nurse filled in a chart and led her away. I sat in a hard, plastic chair and waited. A radio played jazz quietly in the background. She came back two hours later, her arm tightly bound in a white cloth sling. Grinning, she held out her wrist to show me the plastic ID bracelet fastened there with a metal clip, spelling out her name in smudged purple letters, identified as female, blood type B negative.“He let me keep the x-ray of my arm.” Euphoric. “That’s why it took so long. They had to find a technician.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I can’t feel a thing.” She shook the bottle of painkillers the doctor had given her like a castanet as we retraced our path, the world filling in now as the dawn light grew, clumps of emerald moss between cracks in the pavement, the bright light of the hospital sign. People passed us heading for their morning meetings and lectures and commutes and I wondered if they could see us, if we walked invisible through an overlapping universe, jarred out of focus when we crashed into one another in the night. I bent down to pick up a worm stretched out swollen and purple on the asphalt and placed it gently in the soil. Back at the house, she asked me to tape the x-ray to the window. Radius. Ulna. Fine striations, our collision etched in the bone.

• A weekend trip with all the roommates. On the plane, Gia’s seat neighbor showed her a photograph of Queen Elizabeth, resplendent in a blue cape, diamond-encrusted tiara, and wristwatch. Airplane food — two scoops of reconstituted egg garnished with a slice of orange and dry wheat toast. A woman arguing with the crew about checking her bicycle, trying to find room to place the carton filled with giant bunches of lychees and lavender, a tiny tortoise-shelled cat embroidered on the bag. The scent of lavender enveloped us as she wobbled past. Staring out the window into the various patches of land below, rock pools set deep in sandstone, a dark astronomical lens peering back through time.

• A typology of stone. The night before her term paper was due, she stood in the center of her room surrounded by hand-drawn diagrams, lab reports, and the photographs from the trip, trying to piece them together. “I don’t think I can do this.” She looked up at me, then crouched down awkwardly, her arm still in a sling, to pick up a cross-section, leaving a gap of hardwood floor in the paper mosaic. I opened the window and the breeze smelled faintly of freshly cut grass; it rippled through the pages bleached of color in the dim light. I could see her face reflected in the mirror above her desk, concentrating, biting her lower lip. Her father had insisted she take geology as a minor, something to fall back on, the gravitas of stone. And she attended every lecture, getting up at seven in the dark winter mornings as I only wanted to lie in bed, deep under the covers in a cave of warmth, sometimes catching a glimpse of her shadow underneath my bedroom door as she walked through the hall, dressed in her brown corduroys, ragged at the hems and just an inch short so that her socks always showed, her cloth backpack crammed with books and slung across her navy wool jacket. Then I would fall asleep, waking again when I heard her return, her face always bright from cycling through the cool morning air. She took detailed, elaborate notes, carefully wrote up each lab, spent hours sitting at her desk, her head in her hands, studying the 600-page textbook. Once she showed me a Burgessia Bella, a dark round body with a skinny whip-like tail, embedded in gray stone. “My professor says it’s exclusive to the Burgess Shale in Canada — 530 million years old. It swam along the bottom of the sea and then one day it sank into the sediment and died. Isn’t it strange, that I can hold it here now, in my hand? It looks like a shadow burned into the rock. Somehow it survived.” She was especially interested in trace fossils — not the remnants of the animal but some record of its movement, burrowings, tracks, the imprint of a body, captured by a pocket of clay or mud and then baked hard by the sun or buried under layers of moss. It wasn’t the discovery that interested her, whether by accident or erosion, but more the knowledge of it lying there in the darkness, tremulous, secret. I think the idea of it being uncovered upset her, the earth sliced open by a sharp metal blade revealing the imprint, the exposure of something that should remain silent and numinous. It was better left sealed in the stone matrix, protected by thick layers of soil and clay.“I don’t think I can do this.” She studied the cross-section, passed it to me, bent down again, and reorganized a series of photographs. I looked at my watch — past midnight; panic had set in. It was always like this with her, panic needing to reach a certain critical mass, engulfing her, usually carrying me along with it, before the words came, still tortuous and slow. She preferred working by eye, by touch. She couldn’t sit still but needed to rearrange the pages of notes, feel the rock samples in her hands, scratch them with her fingernail, a penny, a nail, even taste them as if she could swallow their essence, her body always in contact with the hard surfaces.

  It took all night; I sat cross-legged on the floor with her typewriter on my lap and typed up the report as she dictated it to me, making corrections, interleaving the typed pages with figures, and glossy photographs. The printer ran out of paper on page 17 and we had to make do with green-tinged sheets taken from her sketchbook. It came to sixty-two pages, “Profile: North American Geology,” a patchwork report fastened by a large butterfly clip. She asked me to type all the names in red capitals, to bold them so that they stood out sharply — SHALE LIMESTONE MICA QUARTZ. I remember the feel of their imprint as I ran my fingers across each completed page, garnet inclusions in a metamorphic rock.

• Postcards she sent us over Christmas break, from her home in Seattle. Gandhi in a loin cloth, staring out between the spokes of a spinning wheel. A black and white photograph from Life Magazine of a nuclear test, “Yucca Flat, Nevada, 1953.” A Georgia O’Keefe print of a patch of sky seen through the hollow of a pelvic bone bleached white in the sun.

• An agate marble that shone a dusky silver-red, the cracked blade of a pocket knife, the ID bracelet from the hospital, five or six rings she often wore. She had been assigned a self-portrait in her studio class. She took a wire coat hanger and undid one end, twisting it into a spiral, then hung these objects from it with varying lengths of string. Her instructor gave her a B+, saying the sculpture was too abstract, lacked feeling, it was only a cage. But I found it beautiful, ethereal. It had a certain asymmetry to the eye, yet every part balanced perfectly. I hung it in the window and would watch from my bed as it spun gently in the breeze, a kind of armature, netting her heart as the dull metals caught the light.

• Someone drinking tea at the table next to mine, the scent of jasmine. A cover at a local bar, vaguely familiar, disguised at first by the unusual rhythm but the words seeping in, Well it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance, With the stars up above in your eyes … A certain quality of light, granular and blue, at dusk, when there’s been heavy rain. What sneaks up on me when I’m least expecting, takes my breath, catches me unaware.

• Her photographs. The faces like stonefish, floating above the blue afghan on her bed. Photographs of rock pools in San Francisco, always with my sneaker or my hand along the rim for scale. The series she called “Camera Obscura.” This involved photographing round objects in square containers, or square objects in round containers (“Even Aristotle questioned how the sun could make a circular image when it shined through a square hole,” she explained), or in making her body look like what it wasn’t — an arum lily, a marble column.

• A weekend in late January, a gray, cold day, everything slightly damp. She took us all to Chicago as a thank-you for our help. We walked along the Chicago River, and climbed through a sort of hollowed cliff, searching for toe-holds in the dirt and overgrown roots, coming out at the base of the DuSable Bridge. She asked us to photograph her, sitting by the water underneath the bridge; peering through what I think was a hollowed-out log. We found a metal ladder used by a work crew that was screwed to the wall of the bridge and climbed from the darkness below up onto a wind-filled platform. She balanced there, a white fragile body on the ledge of the bridge’s dark eye, her arms raised so that she appeared to hold up the flat roof — a caryatid. A photograph taken from above as she clung to the ladder, her sharp face and round shoulder emerging through the lens. After an hour, shivering with cold, we had to stop and find warmth. We sat huddled together on the platform below the bridge as protection from the wind and drank from a thermos of tea. Cole draped a wool blanket over our knees and slowly a little warmth came. I tasted rain on my lips. Shallow waves echoed in the stone hollow, and entered the spaces between words. I would’ve stayed there, enduring the discomfort, dampness seeping in at the small of our backs, curling up in the bone. She jumped up and handed me the Thermos, the cold air digging deeper into my bones. “Look at my skin — it’s blue,” she said, and laughing, held her hands out to show me. She stood up, her feet still bare, cracked and bleeding a little from the crushed stones, to spin around and around with a kind of heavy grace on the dirt, then ran across to the far wall and pressed herself, her palms and her cheeks, against it. This is what I most remember. An ability to metamorphose, to sink into her environment, to embrace it, smudges of ink or clay on her hands, her cheekbone. Pressed against the curved wall of the base. Maybe her trace is there still. She pulled me up, and we both leaned out over the ledge, reaching out our hands to catch the drops of rain just starting to fall.

  She told us later that she had lost the film. And then, even later, that she had found the film, but that none of the photographs had turned out.

• What’s left behind.

  A taste for pistachios at odd hours. A paperback I’d lent her on the beat poets, boldly underlined in red. A surprising knowledge of marine geology. Tapes of Van Morrison. Memory hollowed by time.

When the film is finally unwound in the red light of the dark room and dipped in the chemical bath, the exposed silver-halide particles turn into silver, a black metal. The dark areas in the released image carry the least trace of silver and appear transparent while the light areas appear opaque. The image is transferred from the negative to a sheet of light-sensitive photographic paper. As the transferred image is dipped once again in the chemical bath, the areas of darkness and light are reversed. She appears slowly before your eyes: a sharp face peering up at you, her round shoulders, luminescent, shining out of the dark square, as if her image has been captured at the moment of birth. The Mohists (after the philosopher Mo Ti, 470-391 B.C.E.) knew and taught that objects reflect light, and called this “shining forth.”

Shining forth. What a perfect description of the lingering effect of her attitude and grace.

big head

During my last year living in Cambridge, a friend’s daughter Jenna did a project at school that involved a life-size cut-out of Steve Buscemi’s head on a stick. I’ve no idea what the school project was about, but when the first semester was over and the extended holiday break began, she brought Steve with her.

Not surprisingly, it was she who decided it would be appropriate to make Steve part of the friend family … an extra, if you will. Given Jenna’s compassionate nature, I can easily see her understandable soft spot for actors who’ve been cut up and pasted onto cardboard.

So there was a scene that happened about twelve times a day. Someone was busy doing three things at once … running after pets, talking on the telephone, and making a cup of coffee, for instance … and then suddenly s/he turns, and Steve is staring at him/her.

So s/he jumps and screams and is startled. And everyone else laughs.

“What’s Steve Buscemi doing in the cupboard? Get him out of there!”

And then that person was relegated to finding an appropriate hiding place to scare the crap out of the next person.

Our friend Bernice, whom we all tried unsuccessfully to startle, would never take the bait. She’d chide us by saying, “Do you really think that Steve would be in our cupboard or the refrigerator or in the shower?”

She was right, of course. There was no logical reason why we should scream when we’d see Steve Buscemi staring at us from the bathroom mirror or the edge of the bookcase or from inside the fireplace.

There was no reason, but it still happened. A lot.

My point to this post was going to be something about an article I’d read regarding politics and education. About how, when it comes right down to it, playing with cut-outs of Steve Buscemi’s head is far more valuable than learning how to take standardized tests. Because playing with Steve teaches important lessons about reality, which clearly cannot be learned by filling in little bubbles with a number two pencil. And about how doing well on standardized tests is a useless skill that becomes obsolete as soon as you leave school; I mean, it’s not even a fun party skill. Fun party skills involve such things as knowing how to light a match from a matchbook with only one hand, and I’m pretty sure that’s not on the new standardized test.

But I lost the thread of argument before it even started when I opened a package and saw Steve Buscemi’s head bubble-wrapped inside the box.

Yup … Steve struck again, compliments of Jenna. An attached note revealed that she came across him in a box tucked safely in her attic while she was packing up her eldest daughter for college. How lucky am I to have friends considerate enough to send a big head across state lines?

Nice move, J.

So I’ll end this with gratitude for the educational value of friends. Thank goodness I’ve people to teach me things. As Bernice once so patiently explained, Steve Buscemi won’t fit into the refrigerator.

sight unseen

About a month ago, I received a call from a friend in Canada. He’d just returned from Haiti after serving a two-year stint in the Peace Corps, and he wanted to share something with me.

The people there, he said, are suspicious of folks with disabilities, and he encouraged me to be extra careful while on an upcoming trip. “There’s something especially troubling to Haitians about the blind,” he said, “so please take good care.”

Huh. The Haitians are blindists. Who knew?

As for the wish to be safe and take care, I assured him that it wouldn’t be a problem. First of all, I was going to Ohio, not Haiti. Secondly, even if I had chosen the Caribbean over the Midwest, it’s not like I’d have swung my stick at ‘em like piñatas. Contrary to what some believe, being visually impaired hasn’t made me a complete nitwit.

I spent the remainder of the day packing my travel essentials (Bible, iPads, journal, favorite pens and pencils, Kerouac, and several pairs of glasses and sunglasses), and neatly organizing my bag.

Only one person questioned my selections. Cole, Jayne’s latest new boyfriend, seemed confused as to why I just didn’t download a digital copy of the books onto a device.

“If you have to ask, you’ll not understand,” I said, “but I believe electronic books are akin to desecrating the flag.” I then shot a disapproving look in what I believed was Jayne’s general direction and quickly dismissed him. I can’t be bothered with dolts who don’t appreciate the community of the written word — an arrogance defined many years ago by a dear friend named Jacob, and bestowed upon me by the man himself.

Jacob loved words and books, and he lived his life in their immediate presence. Indeed, his life and the element of language in which he lived were indivisible. I cannot imagine his existence — a man made of flesh and blood, a man who walked in the sunlit streets of Europe, chatted with friends, ate good food and drank good wine, who slept and dreamed in the light of the moon — unless I remember as well the language in which he placed these things. His presence in my life taught me to understand that our human experience, however intense it may be, is truly valid only in proportion to its expression in words.

Expression is a word and a concept in which he had complete faith. He believed that poetry was expression and that it was founded upon aesthetics. Consequently, in our time and place, we’re distracted by the notion of communication, which is perhaps inferior to expression. I believe Jacob thought so, anyway.

I say all that to say just this: while I’m legally blind, words nonetheless allow me to see farther into the world than most sighted people. Little by little, I’ve come to realize the strange irony of events in the past few years. While others often think of Paradise as a garden or a palace, I’ve come to imagine it as a kind of library, with me at the center of billions of words in thousands of languages.

That’s Paradise. On Earth, however, I’m unable to make out the title pages and the spines without the aid of technology. In the early stages of my impairment, I felt anger at my God who granted me books and blindness at one touch. Now I feel neither self-pity nor reproach, as I’m compelled to make it the cornerstone and definition of my being. In doing so, I’m reminded of Homer, also blind, who made as much of a balance between oral tradition and the history of the Trojan wars.

As important as books are (and as important as writing is), there’s yet another, a fourth dimension of language that’s just as important and that’s older and more nearly universal than writing. This other side of the miracle of language is the oral tradition, which encompasses the telling of stories, the recitation of epic poems, the singing of songs, the making of prayers, the chanting of magic and mystery, the exertion of the human voice upon the unknown — in short, the spoken word.

In the history of the world, nothing’s been more powerful than the ancient and irresistible tradition of vox humana. This tradition is especially and above all the seat of the imagination, and the imagination is a kind of divine blindness in which we see not with our eyes, but with our minds and souls … in which we dream the world and our being in it.

My friend’s stories of his service in the Peace Corps have proven to be a voyage of faith for me in more ways than one. Not only are each of us able to serve as the hands and feet of Jesus as we build His communities and spread the joy of His gift of salvation, but I’m living proof to the infirm that we’re defined not by our inabilities, but by our promise to look onward and, most importantly, upward.

Our resolute belief that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us, diminishes our imperfections, and harnesses His love for us like a mighty beacon of light for all to see and behold.

With that, is it any wonder that I’ve found all color and brilliance in words and languages, spoken or felt, through His grace?

like it is

That winter, as I lay on my new rug pressed on the floor, songs of love and despair leaked out of the pipes and sighed from the air shaft: Nessun dorma. Recondita armonia. The ancient building’s steam heaters hissed, its hidden pipes groaned, and its joints cracked late at night. I huddled under blankets to keep out the midwestern cold that layered the floor, turned on my stereo, played the guitar, and listened to shouts from the street and the booted feet of neighbors returning from late parties or afternoon shifts. The arias darted out like mice in the silences: Di’ tu se fidele! Un bacio, un bacio ancora, un altro bacio!

I met the singer one afternoon in the laundry room while trying to fold a fitted sheet. A student at the local university, Oliver was planning to attend law school when he graduated, as he’d promised his parents, though he admitted that he continued voice lessons and confessed to the dream of becoming an operatic tenor. The residents in the units on either side of his reported that they could scarcely hear, so he practiced in his room. He didn’t know about the secret hollows in the old building’s entrails that funneled his voice past their apartments straight to mine.

Oliver was a big man with a round, self-deprecating face and a soft speaking voice that bore no resemblance to the strong, sweet, buttery tenor that surged through the pipes. In the laundry room, we spoke across a friendly distance about the personalities of the washing machines and the strange prejudices of the bill changer. I kept the secret of my front-pipe seats to myself.

With practice, I could identify each aria in the thicket of car horns, rock anthems, and shouts that thrust through the doors, walls, and windows. At Oliver’s first note, I’d head to the window on the airshaft and crank it open. His voice pushed upwards, dislodging paint flakes and the soot of many winters. Una furtiva lagrima. La rivedra nell’estasi. La dona e mobile. I’d even been known to stand inside the shower. The pipe that led to the shower wasn’t to be relied on in delivering hot water, but it delivered that tenor voice with precision. Amici in vita e in morte.

I often pretended to sing along, with operatic gestures. I clowned because I was reminded of the pressures that accompanied parental promises and because we’d make popcorn in the miraculously-unchoked fireplace of the hundred-year-old building, with butter kept overnight on the window sill. It didn’t matter if the butter came powdered with an early morning layer of snow and soot. Everything was an in-joke during that first year. Vesti la giubba: Ridi Pagliaccio!

The next few years fan out like pictures that I discover in a drawer and can’t quite summon the energy to paste into a photo album: Gia and me lying on the sofas, watching Greta Garbo on the 2am movie; our floors carpeted with friends rolled in sleeping bags; Shea avoiding the camera’s eye across a room filled with men in suits and women in cocktail dresses; Bobby at the end of a long lecture hall, his head emerging from a podium and a pile of papers; Matt pushing his girlfriend on a swing.

Addio, senza rencor; addio, o dolce svegliare!

Then quite by accident, one day I glanced down at an opera review and Oliver’s name leaped up. He was singing tenor in a touring production of an American opera company; it was a good review. I searched for him and fished out a dozen other references. One interviewer reported that Oliver had gone to law school and worked as a lawyer for a few years, singing on nights and weekends; finally, he’d gathered his courage and his savings and joined a small troupe. Then he had a series of increasingly important parts in bigger theaters. Now, this role and a national tour.

The chilly room, the smell of burnt popcorn and snow, and the sound of a tenor voice climbing through the pipes broke into my mind, battering down the years between. E lucevan le stelle! I called Matt to tell him that Oliver had escaped being a lawyer and was making it in opera after all.

“It’s too bad we can’t call Gia,” he said. “She’s the one who would truly appreciate how ironic, how right, this news is.”

With a lurch of the heart — T’amo, si, t’amo, e in lagrime — I remembered that Gia was the one person we couldn’t call; she passed a few months earlier after a grueling five-year battle with malignant modular melanoma. A blister of tears swelled behind my eyes. One drop broke out, found a path out of my left eye, and tickled the side of my cheek.

I’ve had a lifelong love affair with opera, and at that moment I suddenly realized why: only opera tells life like it really is.