Hello dear ones,
And welcome to tonight's story.
As always now just finding yourself arriving here in that space.
Space of stillness and tranquility.
Of the rest and relaxation.
This time is for you.
You can let go now of.
All your worldly responsibilities.
And allow yourself to be.
Transported away.
Into a storm.
Tonight's story is the night quiet.
Solomon had been singing since before he could reliably speak.
And his voice had always done things that he couldn't fully account for.
His was a good voice by any objective measure.
A warm baritone with unusual range.
Trained over 20 years.
To carry and sustain.
And shame.
He sang professionally in a quartet that toured regional concert halls.
And he taught voice to students who ranged from talented to determined.
And he was happy with his life.
Which was an underrated thing.
And between the hours of two and four in the morning.
Two or three nights a week.
He walked.
He had begun doing this in his 20s.
During a period of insomnia that never quite resolved into full wakefulness.
A liminal state.
That he had come to think of as the city's breathing room.
He walked because he could not sleep.
And because the city at two in the morning was a very different city.
Quieter.
Stranger.
And more honest.
And he sang.
He had noticed,
At first only vaguely.
That his voice at that hour seemed to go to places it couldn't go in daylight.
Not louder,
But more directed.
Like a beam rather than a broadcast.
You would sing something.
Back or gershwin.
Or a traditional song he'd learned from his grandmother.
And he would feel the sound leave him and go purposefully somewhere.
Through the wall of a building.
Or up to a lit window on a second floor.
Or down an alley.
Toward a sound he couldn't hear but could sense.
He had thought for a long time that he was imagining this.
Then,
Two years into his night walks,
A woman had stopped him in the street.
At 2.
30 in the morning.
Which was not a time when you expected to meet your neighbors.
And said to him,
Without preamble,
Was that you singing about 20 minutes ago?
He admitted that,
Yes,
It was.
She said.
Her voice had that quality of someone whose face had recently been wet.
I was.
.
.
I was having a very bad night.
And then I heard it.
Just barely through my window.
And I got up and I opened my window.
And I listened until I couldn't hear it anymore.
She pressed her lips together.
And I just wanted to say,
Thank you.
He had sung his way home that night.
Feeling the specific weight of something.
He could not have predicted when he started.
You can't taste small,
No.
Not a log exactly,
More a collection of things he had felt the music doing.
The places it had seemed to go.
The particular songs that arrived in him on particular nights.
He did not choose the songs as a rule.
They came to him the way his grandmother used to say prayers came to her.
Already shaved.
Already addressed.
And needing only to be spoken.
On a night in December.
He found himself singing a lullaby he barely knew.
Something he had heard once in a concert.
And had apparently retained without knowing it.
He sang it for four or five minutes,
Standing on the pavement outside a block of flats.
Feeling the sound climb.
Then he moved on.
Three weeks later,
A card appeared.
In the post box of the building where he lived.
Addressed to the man who sings.
Which was how the building had come to know him.
Inside itself.
My baby would not sleep for the first three months.
And I was losing my mind.
One night I heard you.
And I open the window.
You were singing a lullaby.
And she went to sleep between one verse and the next.
I am not exaggerating.
I don't know what you did or who you are,
But please don't stop.
Solomon penned the card above his desk.
He had,
He knew,
No explanation for any of it that would satisfy a sceptic.
He was just a man who walked at night and sang.
The fact that the singing appeared to find its way to whoever needed it.
Through brick and glass and the thick insulation of the sleeping city.
He could not account for that.
Could only observe it,
Be grateful for it,
And continue.
On his better nights,
He thought.
Every city contains this kind of care.
Distributed invisibly among the people who move through it in the quiet hours.
The nurses.
Going to and from late shifts.
The bakers.
Cleaners.
The people who walk because they cannot sleep.
The ones whose gifts work best when no one is watching.
He was simply one of them.
He turned his collar up against the December cone.
And began to walk home.
As he walked,
He sang.
Something wordless and warm.
That rose in the still night air.
And dispersed across the sleeping rooftops.
And found.
Somehow.
Its way to where it was needed.
