Hearing my first Opera

Hearing my first Opera was in Buffalo, New York. My mom’s sister, my aunt Coco, took care of me when I was very young. All I remember was that she had diabetes; she considered me her favorite. She also painted pictures with lovely colors. Later on she had to leave us, and go back to Buffalo. That’s where she was born. When I was 6 or 7, my mom took me to Buffalo, and with my mom’s sister, we went to see my aunt Coco at the state hospital. I was not allowed in, so my mom and aunt took me around the grounds towards the back. A few hospital patients were cutting grass. We stopped and looked way up, and there was my aunt Coco, out on a terrace, waving to us. That was so painful, seeing her up there, she had on a white robe. I remember she had to shout down, and we to her. As mom and my aunt were talking to her, my peripheral vision caught two woman hanging half-way out between the bars of the windows, unraveling two huge rolls of white toilet paper, sweeping them back and forth, singing at the top of their lungs, “ II Trovatore,” and waving to me! At one point, my aunt Coco said to her sisters, “ Now watch your pocketbooks.” It was like a nightmare to me. My aunt Coco never came out; she went into a coma. I remember some years later, when we went to Buffalo, my aunt took us to the cemetery. She didn’t have a head stone, so it took us some time, uncovering the grasses, to find her plot number. I spotted way over to the right, a pile of rubbish—ribbons, old pots, dead flowers, broken statuary—in a large heap. Looking, I found the right shape, not too big in size, and placed it over the spot. Before my mom’s other sister died, years later, she’d always said, “please don’t take me to the state hospital.” They never did!