Download 11 Stories AudioBook Free
When Roscoe Jones, a one-time trumpet prodigy, loses his finger, he loses more than his potential to play. Rather than learning to be a musician, he becomes the superintendent of the Chicago apartment building where he has resided since birth. Very soon, his life is no longer his own; he fades into the background, domestic plumbing and correcting and toiling for the tenants populating the 11 experiences above him. Although they scarcely notice him as anything but a working area of the building, he advances a sometimes unpleasant intimacy with the facts of these complicated lives. Every night, in the personal privacy of his basement quarters, alone with his hidden knowledge longings, he performs his trumpet. That's until the night time he climbs to the roof structure to play in public areas for the first time in 50 years - and the course of his life is irrevocably changed. For some, losses risk turning, unexpectedly, to get. For Roscoe, the human relationships he forms with the tenants - two, in particular - justify the amputation of his finger and the forfeiture of his dreams. That is a story about sacrifice and service, longing and love - and the abiding hopefulness of the individual heart that connects us all.
