Radio as Random Fate

by Dawn Corrigan

Thereafter Mary was hooked, addicted to the opera. Wherever she lived from then on, she would find an opera house and attend almost every performance, a habit which her family found peculiar, since for them the opera was something foreign and therefore unpleasant. They explained her behavior away by saying to each other That’s what happens when you go to college, an explanation that seemed to account for all her differences from them. They had a ready explanation for Tommy’s obsession with his Irish heritage as well, assuring one another that it stemmed from the fact that Tommy’s father, Big Tommy, had died when Tommy was only six, at which time he, an only child, had been flung in to live amongst a swarming mass of Capuano cousins. His Irish music — and whiskey, and everything else — was an attempt, the Capuanos felt sure, to find a connection to his lost, beloved, Irish-surnamed father, and to recapture the relative quiet of his earliest childhood. But for the rest of the family their love affair with music was fueled by whatever happened to be playing on Top 40 radio at the time.

6S

Dawn Corrigan's fiction has appeared recently or is forthcoming at VerbSap, Pindeldyboz, Monkeybicycle, The Dream People, Rumble, 55 Words, Defenestration, and 3711 Atlantic. Her nonfiction appears regularly at The Nervous Breakdown. (Libiamo ne’lieti calici is the previous piece in this ongoing series.)