Was

The voice floods the air. The aria is Un bel di from Madam Butterfly.

Was it the inimitable Callas or is my memory beginning to play tricks?

I know she returned to NY in 1945 the year I was 14 so possibly it was she I heard that spring,

Spring brought many things to Hells Kitchen, a potpourri of good and bad. The oppressive heat fell into both categories.

But it also necessitated opening the tenement windows, Without warning voices of unidentified vocalists overrode both the the popular soap operas as well as always constant conversation in the crowded railroad flats.

We never knew who sang out from that window across the alley separating the luxury of West 57th street from our neighborhood identified only as Hell’s Kitchen by the tabloids.

Yet from the advent of May until the first breeze of October it was their music, their selections and their magic that was we heard from dawn to dusk on 58th street.

It was rarely embraced by the elders nor hummed by the younger generation. It was a subtle injection that would only be recognized decades later when both Hells Kitchen and the unknown vocalists had departed.

And so it was, a long time later, as I listened far from my beloved city, in awe to the renowned Maria Callas, I remembered hearing her voice carry across a small alley while I sat sipping coffee.

If it was not she, so be it, because whoever I heard intrduced me to the magic and the mystery of another of God’s gifts, music and musicians.