Butterfly

After two choruses from Verdi operas, I put in two of my mother's favorite songs from when she was a teenager in Italy, then one my father used to play as he stood by the jukebox.

This marks a transition from her family of origin to marrying an American GI and the father of her children.

I'm not saying she wouldn't have liked Puccini or Madame Butterfly anyway, but I know she felt like Butterfly in a way that she never felt like Aida or Fenena.

I am not sure when that started. I was only nine the first time he cheated, plus there was a time before I was born when he he had feelings for someone else... it put a great strain on the marriage.

Did she feel like Butterfly as soon as she married an American soldier and enthusiastically embraced all things American? (Watching a performance as an adult, that perspective broke my heart.) Or did that feeling happen later, after the soldier proved faithless?

I don't know.

What I do know, though, is that she did not become Butterfly, at least not the opera version.

In the opera, Pinkerton's new wife comes for his son with Butterfly, because Pinkerton is too cowardly to face Butterfly himself. Taking the blade with which her father killed himself -- on which it is written "Those who cannot live with honor can die with honor -- she takes her own life, having already surrendered it to her husband.

That was not my mother. 

She was hurt, a lot. If her children had been taken, I don't know what would have happened, but she had her children and she loved and worked and thrived for them.

That thriving becomes a larger pattern of her life, and there will be another post for that.

I am getting more to the point where I will be able to write an obituary. 

For now, I should say that there was another version for Butterfly as well.

The opera was based on a short story by John Luther Long.

It is mostly the same, but after agreeing to give up the child and starting to kill herself, Butterfly is interrupted by her maid, Suzuki, who pinches the child to make him cry.

Butterfly stops, and her child crawls into her lap. Suzuki dresses the wound, and when Kate Pinkerton arrives the next day, the house is empty.

Okay, the odds of a classical opera ending that way were always pretty low. You either tend to have a majorly happy, triumphal ending, or a tragedy with at least the soprano dead, the tenor and the baritone as well. 

Fortunately, life is seldom operatic in its scope; small victories and joys can get us through.

If those small joys happen because someone is looking out for you, good! We should be looking out for each other.  

Related posts: 

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2024/08/my-mother-my-talk.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/08/1960-1958-july-daily-songs.html