I Think I Understand Why My Father Liked Opera

I think I understand why my father liked opera.

Riding the curve of a disappointing life,

For him, there would be no vindication at its close,

No triumph or grand defeat.

He simply stopped breathing.

Opera never ends like that.

And death is always monumental.

Opera is a theory of mind,

Costumed reflections channeling ageless themes,

And we, by our small presence,

Channel them as well.

My father's life had none of this,

Succumbing as he did

In the lingering embrace of liver cancer.

Now, in my mind, thirty years later,

Only a few scenes remain,

Each lit by bursts of questionable memory.

The Medalion

Samuel Baird Asia

In the beginning,

His father, Samuel,

With a name too depleted to take root,

Even in the raw soil of the New World,

Took his place in the chutes of Ellis Island,

Emerging deloused,

And stripped of consonants.

Here he is, stamped on a tin medallion,

By W. Lapham & Co. of Chicago,

Forever fresh with confidence.

Bessie Eder Asia

Sam's Wife

In The Beginning

Bessie, Sam, and Baby Hershell

Nearly all of Sam’s lifeHas been erased by the

By the fade of two generations.

But the remaining shards suggest

That he declared an end to history,

Reinventing himself

As man of large affairs,

Only to lose that self as well

In the great depression.

Then, in a final betrayal of those promises

Struck on the Lapham medallion,

He careened off some bridge,

A solitary Jewish molecule,

Suspended in the thick, desperate air of the thirties,

Before plunging down

To his death.

My family made no references to grieving.

But perhaps the ebb and flow

Of my father’s rage and silence,

Perhaps my own fear,

Came from that unacknowledged singularity.

Or came, instead, from the aboriginal time,

A golem from the old country,

Stowed in a steamer trunk,

Or an outlaw corpuscle rafting to the new world

In the throbbing blood of Russian immigrants.

Young Hershell

All I was told,

While being tucked blind into my life,

Was that Bessie, his wife, mastered what was left,

Reconstructing the legacy

Deal by deal,

By craft and force of character.

And so I was able to go to university.

There had to have been more,

But I never inquired.

Below is an early photo of my father,

Delicately cradling his pipe

Like a talisman.

But, in spite of what we believe when young,

Tobacco does not redeem us, and,

As for Bessie, she must have caught scent

Of Sam’s large affairs,

Losing her fragile instinct

For childrearing in the process.

She sent my father to a private school,

A kind of sanitarium for disappointing children.

But the waters did not cure him.

Maybe, like me, he couldn’t do the math,

Or he hid from his coaches,

Feigning a limp after lunch

To avoid the humiliation of a soft belly

And breasts too large to pass unnoticed through

The gauntlet of boys' lockers.

Maybe he knew what I knew,

What Sam knew,

The only Jew on the starched fields

Of Christian privilege.

Or maybe it was just grief.

Reckless Hobo

The next scene features my father

Playing a reckless hobo

From the western edge of the continent,

Jumping an eastbound freight to Milwaukee

To court Theresa, a middle daughter,

Cast in her family forever in a supporting role.

Theresa arrives by rail out west for Thanksgiving,

They marry,

And now he must take on roles

For which he was poorly schooled,

Those of husband, father, and businessman,

Dog paddling in Sam and Bessie’s wake.

Theresa Leah

Gorenstein-Asia

I know so little about him before this,

There being no chronicler,

Until my mother, who, as Mother,

Became my eyes and ears,

Fashioning a father from the scar tissue

Of her own wounds.

To his mother, my father was the lesser of two,

Content to live a smaller life

In the shadow of his younger brother.

With Bessie’s blessing, Benjamin received the birthright,

But, unlike Jacob, not by deceit.

Rather, because this Esau had no use for it.

As a husband,

In the performance art of intimacy,

My father was a percussionist,

Punctuating our house with concussive bursts.

But his true instrument was the door –

Interior doors, exterior doors,

At times slammed with such tectonic force as to shatter glass.

After these eruptions

He would seclude himself

In his small room,

The vessel transporting him

Into the damnations of Don Giovanni,

Or Carmen’s seduction of Don Jose.

Fleeting moments of sweetness

In my parents’ marriage,

A brief kiss on my mother’s offered cheek,

However large in my memory,

Were but oases

In the desert of their solitary lives.

It was as a father that he is the most confusing,

Unable to infuse himself

Into the lives of any of his children.

On some Sunday mornings,

He and I would bowl,

And I remember his ball

Thudding deafeningly down

Out of his hand,

A nuclear spin

Arcing it miraculously

Into the center of the lane.

On some Saturday afternoons,

My father and I

Would watch Seattle Rainiers baseball

At Sick’s Stadium.

With his sometimes smoldering cigar

Poking like a prosthetic out of his round face,

And with me and my mitt dangling at his side,

He would make his way to a box seat like a prince of the city.

My Father, My Brother, Me, My Sister, and Mother

My Brother's Bar Mitzvah, 1955

My Father and I, 1951

I am 4

There was more, of course,

But nearly all of my memories of my father

Taste of melancholy,

The remains, I suspect,

Of many missed opportunities

To touch one another when we had the chance.

We are led to believe that the greatest endeavor

Undertaken by men of my father’s generation

Was their work.

Thrown forward from the Depression,

To quick families, and, from there,

Into the maw of war.

Not naturally given to self disclosure,

They spoke little

Of what they had seen and done.

So much of their own dignity

And the esteem of their wives

Lay in a thin skin fashioned

From the dreams of their immigrant ancestors,

From bearing witness to the desolation

Of their wars,

And, finally, from a return to an America,

Like Narcissus, in love with its reflection

In the eyes of a decimated old world.

In my memory, insufficient light shines on

My father’s endeavors as a businessman,

Too dimly to see anything

But shadows cast

By his mother and father,

And what remains of a meager oral history.

In spite of his privileged birth,

Or perhaps because if it,

I don’t think my father

Had a pool of self

From which to drink until the 1940s,

When the great lens of war

Brought his life into clearer focus.

My Father's induction Notice, 1944

In 1944, after four years with Boeing

And the Shipyards, at the age of 32,

He enlisted.

And you can see from his smile,

From the cock of his hat,

That, away from the friendly fire

Of familial demons,

And in spite of the nightmare

Into which he might have been thrown,

He reinvented himself

As Private First Class,

483rd Quartermaster Refrigeration Company.

He served in the Battle of the Bulge,

That last penetration of Allied Lines

By the lunatic German,

And his apocalyptic Panzers.

Demobilized in 1946

He came home.

Physically intact,

We assumed him whole.

Now, when we presume to understand

The burdens our children and young men

Carry back with them from our casual wars,

Nostalgia has blinded us

To even traces of what this founding cohort

Brought home to the privacy of the dark,

Or the complex faces of their new babies.

In my father’s case,Struggling with his own invisible calculus,

Salvation came in the form of

Distances he created

As a traveling salesman.

Years later,

Having created my own distance, my wife and I

Wandered into a fabric store in Okanogan.

The woman waiting on us

Remembered the odd name – Asia,

Remembered when, two decades earlier,

She had served a salesman breakfast

On his trips through town,

Selling men’s wear to dry goods stores

In towns like hers,

Wide spots

Along the length of State Route 97.

Bessie Asia, My Father's Mother, c. 1960

My father would leave on Monday mornings

And return for Sabbath dinner on Fridays.

As I remember it, this is where

Our greatest unhappiness

Played itself out.

My mother and father did not enjoy

The degree of intimacy sufficient

To allow them a seamless reunion

After five days of separation,

And I was never aware of them

Approaching one another

With the tenderness

Necessary to smooth the edge off

Those places where they might have touched.

Bessie would be there,

Circling,

Scavenging whatever bits of dignity remained.

My Father in 1972

I understand now, that, when my father erupted

Towards the end of a Friday’s meal,

With the hearts of his children

Aching for him, but closed,

Bereft of adult allies,

He was simply trying to feel better.

I was frightened throughout my childhood,

Not so much of being hurt,

Because the doors

Bore the brunt of any physical violence in our house.

Rather, my fear was without shape or name,

That my house, my world,

Could implode at any moment

Because of some poorly managed demolition,

And my entire family

Would cease to exist.

The hero’s journey,

Begins on the weekends of childhood,

Protecting his family

From self inflicted catastrophe.

I have more remnants,

And, regardless of my selfish

Reconfiguring of him here,

My father was not one dimensional.

Nor was he sad.

Without ambition,

He was also without pretension,

With an openness and a generosity

Available to anyone.

The massive station wagons

He piloted while on the road

Became lifelines for this or that relative or friend

Stranded somewhere in the rare Seattle snowstorm.

Having spent several months

In Paris prior to his demobilization,

He could astound those just returning

With a nearly photographic recollection of the city.

He was kind,

And yet he robbed me of the chance

To sit with him as he became old,

Leaving me to wonder

If I would have done so

Had he lived.

Of all there is of him in me,

Whether hidden or revealed,

None has resonated with such force,

In life and as metaphor,

As his admonition not to trade

With London’s Dunhill Tobacconists

Because they refused to sell

To enlisted men during the war.

To me, still laying out the

Perimeter of my own life,

Honoring this became a sacrament:

Regardless of one’s elevation,

In the human topography,

Real or imagined,

There will be those who will diminish you,

And by so doing,

Cause the diminishment of all.

Two images from a book my father brought from Europe

with his demobilization, a book which fascinated me as

a child and still does to this day:

The First World War: A Photographic Hstory,

edited by Laurence Stallings, Simon and Schuster,

New York, 1933

Only now, three decades since his death,

Do I realize that what others

May have considered flaws of character,

Were, in part, tributaries of a larger flow of imperfect pacifism.

Mythologies are manufactured

From such small bits of memory,

And so a son’s life becomes a tribute

To the life of his father.

My Father's Obituary:

Asia, Hershell S.

Passed away June 11.

Husband of Theresa, Father of Susan Sterns, Waterville ME;

Richard and David Asia, both of Seattle;

Brother of Benjamin S. Asia, Seattle.

Three grandchildren.

Member of Temple de Hirsch Sinai.

Services Friday 1pm, Arthur A. Wright Funeral Home.

Internment Hills of Eternity.

Remembrances may be made to a favorite charity.

My father was 63 when he died

And I am 60 as I write this.

From behind the mourner’s curtain,

My mother, brother, sister, and I

Watched the small chapel

Fill with friends

Whose names wound round my childhood,

And with some people whose names

We’d never heard,

All people that he’d gathered to him

In a troubled, but overwhelmingly generous

And unassuming life.

Opera is about inevitability clothed in purple.

We are drawn to it for its

Grand logic at the final curtain.

My father died in a hospital in 1975,

After IV fluids ceased working miracles.

And, after all these years,

Wandering in the incomplete libretto

He left behind,

The ending still eludes me.

Legacy: My sister, Brother, and I

1951