from Compositions by Christy McNamara
After the economic collapse and banking crisis I, like many others, became an economic migrant. Like generations before us we spread across the world in search of employment when there was none at home.
I got an opportunity to go to New York with an offer of a job as a night watchman in a new high rise apartment building that was being built on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. I was given the graveyard shift which was 12 hrs long. The building had no residents at this time so there was a lot of time on my hands and not a lot happening at my end.
One of my duties involved checking every part of the unoccupied building, making sure that everything was in order, safe and secure from the basement to the luxury penthouse while construction was going on. In the middle of December in the height of winter while on one my nightly rounds I could hear the wind echoing off the hard surfaces of the building and making strange noises, some that were almost human like cries to my ear.
Coming down the stairs from the penthouse 40 floors up on one of those nights I suddenly realised that I had been humming a bit of a melody all the way down imitating some of the sounds I had heard of the building being blown by the wind. I sang it into my phone for fear of losing the notes before I got to the foyer even though it was only half a tune at this stage. The resolve in melody came days later when I picked up my accordion back at my apartment in Brooklyn.
