Something Happened on the Way to the Opera

There were four of us, ladies in desperate search of metropolitan culture, going to the opening night of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” in Denver. We live in Lander, Wyoming, about 350 miles from the nearest city.

Nancy, the driver, is a Latin language expert, and a culture aficionado; she speaks a few languages and has been to many cultural centers of the world. In the front passenger seat sat Edie, who is a young grandmother and a native of Lander. This was to be her first opera experience: brave lady. Aileen and I were in the back, two escaped mothers.

Ours was a motley crew, but we like each other a lot and we have the faith in common, so in that love, all our differences become fascinating journeys into real education. As we drove south out of Lander, the snow lightly falling, Edie taught us about our environment and the creatures- well, the strange doings of people, actually. That’s most what women are interested in. That and food. So we did stop for chocolate as she regaled us, saying a jaunty “Happy Valentine’s Day” to the Rawlins-mellow store clerk (the wind blows so hard that they just stop trying to be jaunty). True to feminine form-or substance?-we played the game, “You Are What You Eat” with our choice of Valentine treat. I was a colorful, hard shell with sweet, cheap chocolate on the inside; Nancy was a hard, shiny chocolate shell with a tangy, powdery milk substance; Aileen was a soft, chocolate cover with crunchy nuts and chewy nougat; and Edie was, simply, nuts.

Edie told us about Lander as we drove on past cultural black holes like “Grandma’s Café –Open”, the kind of place you’d make a horror film about a family from New Jersey stopping there to use the restroom. Edie knows mysterious things like the restaurant in Lander where they leave the side dishes out all night and serve them the next day (important info for the rookie); the Maverick station (where you get good snack food) which was once a dumpy trailer park with a sandwich shop in front. So that plot of land always had a sandwich charism, and now it is fulfilling it completely- no messing around with trailers. The next-to-best story was of Amoretti’s, a beautiful old building and former swanky Italian restaurant on the corner of Second and Main. After a year of twenty-dollar, lacy salads and such, the owners just- left; locking the door, they left the place ready for dinner that night. For weeks and months afterward, Edie said you could still look in the dusty windows and see the fancy place settings, the wine glasses slowly being covered with dust. Lander’s own Great Expectations…and finally, the best story: a Wyoming Romeo and Juliet: I said, remember, Wyoming style: In Hudson, a town near Lander built around a curve in the two-lane highway entering Shoshone and Arapahoe reservation territory, there is a sign that says: “This is the greatest food in the world”. I was busy laughing about that and the “Happy Hocker Pawn Shop” when Edie chimed in, saying, “It really was great food.” The restaurant in question was El Toro, now defunct like Amoretti’s. “Was it Mexican food?” I asked. Edie looked at me in that Wyoming way, just a straight look. “No, it was steak.”

“Oh”. I remembered that this is Wyoming, not California. Edie went on: “El Toro and Svedtler’s were in competition..”

“Was Svedtler’s Mexican?” (I was trying to needle her.)

“ No, Svedtler’s is a German name.” Another straight look, and she continued, “..anyway, these two places were in competition-“

“Two steak places competing in a town with the population of about 50?!”

“Be QUIET, Tami!!” Chorus now.

Edie tried again: “Well, El Toro’s was by far the best. Then, the owner of El Toro’s married the daughter of the owner of Svedtler’s.”

“A Montague- Capulet story! What happened?” exclaimed gentle Nancy. Edie replied in her no-nonsense Wyoming tones, “El Toro’s owner just lost interest in his restaurant and closed it.” There was silence for a few seconds.

It was Nancy’s turn to educate us. She had a collection of CDs; Turkish medleys, Mexican Baroque-“Mexicans do Baroque?” I asked, displaying my shallow-ness- and the best, an Italian Michael Bolton-type. We put him in and he started crooning, “Senxa una donna” (without a woman). The snow was falling now more seriously, and we were on Interstate 80, climbing over the pass from Laramie to Cheyenne. I looked up from my book, Peace of Soul, by Fulton Sheen, and saw the big patch of slush just before we hit it. We started fishtailing at fifty-five mph, and Nancy tried to correct us so we didn’t go off the edge of the highway, down into the trees and rocks in the gully along the highway. In the next instant, we were spinning. For me, it became slow-motion, like when your spider-sense kicks in. Zanchurra the Italian was still crooning and Nancy was yelling “Jesus”, Aileen was praying “Hail Mary”, Edie was frozen, and I was- what was I thinking about? The median wall charging at us and the strange similarity of feeling to a Tilt-A-Wheel ride.

We slammed into the median wall at about 50, and the Tilt-A-Wheel, true to experience, flung us the other way. Suddenly we were driving forward again, and Nancy got us off the road. We all looked at each other, checked poor Aileen’s head, felt our bruises. The car was smoking from a smashed-to-hell engine, so I told everyone to get out so we could check it. As we surveyed the scene, trucks filled with kind, wide-eyed Wyoming tough guys came to help out. They pulled car parts off the highway and smiled at us. We felt better, and just so thankful for being spared. Nancy said flatly, as a huge semi roared past us, “We could have been hit”. The Tilt-A-Wheel image exploded, except that I mused, based on our last thoughts, that Nancy would have been going to see Our Lord, Aileen would have been in the arms of Our Lady, and me? At the eternal Tilt-A-Wheel? That sounds like hell. In my shock state, I was worried about this for awhile.

The Wyoming HP came, the wrecker came (car was totaled) and I got a ride in the back of the patrol car, in the “perp cage”, furthering my worry about my eternal destiny. But I was jolly enough to take a picture of myself and hope for God’s mercy on a frivolous soul, a soul not always in reality enough at the important moments of life. Like the last one.

We got to Laramie, Wyoming’s second or third largest city (not saying much, since the largest, Cheyenne, has only 53,000). Everything on a Saturday closes at noon in Laramie; so we found ourselves with Chad and Misty and their kids, Edie’s family, riding into Cheyenne over the same pass on which we’d crashed.

Nancy: “Well, shall we go to the opera?”

Aileen: “Let’s find out the weather conditions.”

Tami: “We have to take down Denver, remember?”

Edie: “I am going to stay in Cheyenne.” She hugged her grandson.

A few hours later, three of us got a rental Chevy Cobalt from a metaphysically sleepy Avis agent at the- I must say it- absolutely pathetic excuse of an airport that is “Cheyenne Int’l Airport”. I drove. Before leaving we hugged Edie and her family, our rescuers from the wilderness of Laramie, and began our culture-seeking, Frodo-esque journey once again.There was black ice, there was the 7:30 curtain-up deadline; there was the unknown city maze of Denver- the white sharp-tooth mountains rising in the distance; there was the ominous warning of the Cheyennites of “traffic always in Denver”: but we steeled ourselves, thinking of the pioneer women who “did whatever the men did and had babies”. We pulled up to the Grand Hyatt, and the pioneer woman metaphor could go no further. She stayed at the door, her skirts flowing in the wind, looking at us ruefully.

Rushing into the elevator, we were almost bowled over by a man who was holding his chest and calling out for Our Lord. “Alright”, I thought, “there’s a theme going on here.” We called over the hotel staff and he assured them he was fine. “Just a cramp!” he yelled. We continued on up to our room, got ourselves dressed, down again, and got into a taxi. I was expecting a “New York rush” as soon as I got into the taxi, but instead I got “Denver doldrums”. We could have walked faster.

We swooped into the “Ellie Caulkins Opera House” at 7:30 on the dot, transformed into preened peacocks, a far cry from the forlorn little sparrows next to a smashed car. We drank red wine and had a chocolate cookie at intermission, mingled with ball-dresses and very cool, orange-vested western tuxes, and with frightening mini-skirts on sixty-year-old legs and with well-painted, ordered faces. We watched a large man rolling around in exotic silk dress on the stage singing about lust (and I wondered at the ironies of high-culture); but there were a few moments of true sublimity in sound.

After the opera, we decided it was time for dinner, at 10:30 pm- how European of us- and we also decided that we needed a drink-how Western of us-and so we settled ourselves in a hopping Denver place off 16^th St. I made the mistake of having two glasses of wine, which I later put down to pure shock.

We made it back to the Grand Hyatt, and I consider it a great feat that I made it back balancing on little tiny heels. I must have looked like Barbie when you try to make her stand up. As we entered the lobby, Aileen wisely asked about Mass times for the following morning. I thought the surreality of the day was done, but I was mistaken. The man behind the desk, an otherwise typical Colorado boy, asked jauntily, “Well, do any of you speak Latin?” Unbeknownst to him, with us was Nancy, who is probably the ONLY person in a thousand-mile radius who speaks Latin, and fluently. She said, “Ecce boalpoh f lpofpom” (that is what I heard-two glasses, remember?). The bewildered bell-boy said to Aileen, as if Nancy was a foreign personage, “What did she say?” Aileen quipped, “She said, ‘You are handsome’”. The bell-boy, red, looked at Nancy and said slowly, “Well, you’re sort of beautiful.”

As we were lifted to the sixth floor, Nancy said finally, “I guess after forty you get compliments like that. Sort-of beautiful? What is that?”

The next morning, we got ourselves to the Holy Ghost Church for the Latin Mass. We walked into a stunning creation in mahogany and brown marble, with the redeemed Garden of Eden painted and carved into the walls and trimmings; the candles near St. Therese, St. Joseph and Our Lady burned with a strong and gentle light. Our souls were feasted in glorious musical courses: Faure, complex Kyries, the choral voices perfect with ordered passion. The columns, standing like ladies-in-waiting along the side of the main apse, seemed to sing as Our Lord was raised in sacrifice.

“Here” I thought, “is high culture.” And I thanked God for my life, and asked Him to order my soul.

Later, much later, as we drove through the beautiful, open, endless rolling grasslands and eerie, fortress-like rock formations, I remembered Brandy at the Cheyenne airport, a young girl we’d seen while in our rental car fury, on our high-culture search, a girl traveling on her own. She had a shaved-looking head, a beautiful face, and she talked loudly, with Midwestern pancake-tones in the “Cloud-Nine” bar about her back-yard lake in Michigan. We were busy rolling our eyes at this young pup, when we heard an old Wyomer say to her, “You got such a pretty face, young lady, what’s with the hair?” She gave him a sparkling smile. “I was diagnosed with cancer in September, and I lost my hair. It is growing back though,” and she patted her own head affectionately. “It is finally starting to lay down.” The bar fell silent. We fell silent.

As night slowly fell outside the window of our traveling car, as I remembered Brandy, I looked out to see the stars. Out there, in cattle land, cowboy land, the stars are not poking through like pinholes in an opaque black paper sky. They are in the millions, taking over the expanse, and the sky is not flat, but full-form space, and the stars hang down in the living air, within reach like ornaments on invisible strings: millions of tiny glass ornaments, reflecting a light from another source. I felt simultaneously, after a weekend with the theme of approaching death, very earth-bound and yet still desirous about the door to beyond those stars.

Above all, I did not strike the flint to make the spark that is my life; the spark is given me to help start a fire for God in this world. Someday, I pray, in His hands, my spark will float up into the night, disappear, and light up in His heart again.

Driving close to home, through the sad town of Shoshoni, we played the “You Are What You Eat” game again. I was dried out, cured, heavily peppered flesh, Nancy was a Dinty Moore stew, ‘hot and substantial’, and Aileen was, simply, nuts.