An Opera Singer

I sat behind her in the shuttle on the hour-and-a-half ride from Eau Claire to the Minneapolis airport. I was on my way back to Boston after a Thanksgiving spent with my family, she and her husband on their way back to New York after Thanksgiving with his. She was originally from Mexico and carried an adorable, well-modulated accent. He wore a fedora and a longish nose and a certain suaveness that marked him a city man.

Her hair was long, black and curly. “It’s my birthday,” she said to the group of us: her husband, the shuttle driver, and me. “Are you going to sing me happy birthday?”

And so we did, the husband in a gravely voice worthy of Clark Gable, the shuttle driver singing along, and me stumbling through the first few lines, trying to meet their pitch, and finding it—at last—on the final line: “Happy birthday to you!”

“How o-o-old are you?” sang the shuttle driver next.

The husband laughed. “Oh, no we don’t do that.”

“I’m twenty-four,” she said, laughing. “And plus and plus and plus.”

She had a clear voice, an aura of elegance. She looked at me and smiled. “You have a beautiful voice. Do you sing?”

I told her I like to sing and sing a lot at my church, but I’d never been trained.

“I’m an opera singer,” she said.

Ahh. That explained everything. She sang Carmen. He was a cellist. They’d both been educated in the Manhattan School of Music.

WHY do people fit their stereotypes so well?

“If I was walking down the street in New York,” I asked them, “and I said hello to you, and you didn’t know me, would you say hello back?”

Because I do that a lot in Boston. Walking to school, I smile sometimes to people in the street and say hello. Sometimes—maybe if it’s a street worker in a yellow suit—they will say hello back. Mostly, they just look at me funny and hurry on. This is very different than Rusk County.

New York—according to the opera singer and her husband—is also different than Rusk County in that regard. “Why don’t people say hello to strangers?” I asked them. “Is it a trust thing?” And he said he didn’t know, and yes, maybe it was a trust thing, and maybe he would have to try it. And she said she thought people would just not expect it, would wonder what reason you have to talk to them.

She told me a favorite memory of singing in Hong Kong and seeing her face on posters splashed all over the city, on the sides of buses, everywhere.

He told me how he’d given up football, which he loved, when he was 15, because he wanted to be a cellist and he knew he was good.

She told me how she and her sister played guitar and sang Cuban songs together when they were young in Mexico City, and how she’d wanted to enter a competition, but she was 17 and too old to enter with her instrument. So she entered for voice instead and realized she loved it. She had not known she could sing so high. She had not known this power, this music that was a part of her in a way a musical instrument could never be.

We fell asleep then, because it was getting dark and we were all sleepy. We parted ways later, at the airport, with expressions of mutual goodwill. They were gentle, direct, and friendly. New Yorkers or no, I liked them a lot.