When I was 7 years old I saw my first sad ending. I didn’t get it then. Still don’t.

We lived in New York state at the time, on the north side of Long Island, in a town named Glen Cove. Our house was on a dead end street and had been new when we moved in four years earlier. It had three bedrooms, two baths, and one TV – black and white of course. I don’t think anyone had a color television set back then; we were in California by the time NBC began broadcasting Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (1961), which gave the aggressive buyers (not my parents) justification to invest in a color set.

So it was a black and white program that I watched with my father. It was a performance of a Puccini opera called “Madame Butterfly.”

Puccini was my father’s favorite opera composer and I follow him in that. If you want to hear the most penetrating moving arias, listen to Puccini’s. As I did that day.

But I also watched the story. It’s a love story and it has a tragic ending. The male lead is weak and a cad. The heroine then kills herself. Awful.

I watched the kimono-clad woman plunge the knife into her chest and I waited. I assumed something would happen to make it all right. Then the credits began to roll. I looked to my dad.

“Some stories are like that, sweetie,” he said gently. He aimed his handsome face at me and stroked my head. “Some stories in life have happy endings and some have sad, and movies tell stories like life.”

I heard his words but I did not understand. Oh, I’d already experienced death; all it takes is a bug jar for a kid to see and bemoan the end of a firefly or a moth. I knew life contained bumps and bads. But I could not figure out why anyone would want to include a sad ending in entertainment. I thought movies and other performances were supposed to make me feel good. This ending made me feel serious but not good. I didn’t think I needed help feeling that heaviness and solemnity.

My friends didn’t see that opera when I did. Most of them had their first sad ending watching a movie called “Old Yeller.” Yeller was a great dog who gets rabies and has to be destroyed at the end of the film.

There was a lot of talk about “Old Yeller.” What we now call buzz, but among the 7-year old and 8-year old community. They all liked the movie till the final reel. Nobody understood the value of the death ending.

It appears that my pals have since learned to appreciate tragedies. They also seem to like stories that describe life as we live it here and now.

I don’t. I want my entertainment to take me to places or times I don’t visit, and to make me laugh.