211205 Sentinel, Bells

I have always loved the sound of bells ringing. The sound of bells ringing makes me happy.

Christmas is a time for bells to ring out throughout the land.

I don’t care what kind of bell it is, they make me feel good. Be they church bells, school house bells or ships’ bells it doesn’t matter.

One year Joyce found a huge old school bell at a garage sale and bought it for me. That thing weighed about 50 pounds. There was an old power pole in the yard by the house that was abandoned when the electric service entry was changed from one side of the house to the other side. I cut the pole down with my chainsaw but left about 4 feet of it standing and then mounted my bell on top of what was left. Every day at the end of my chores I would clang that bell and I loved that. The neighbors down the hill had a large bell and when their grand kids were visiting they liked to ring their bell. I wound answer their bell and we would go back and forth until the kids got tired of the game.
This picture is a match for the bell Joyce bought for me, even the way I mounted mine.

When I was aboard ship, the ships’ bell would ring out with a different series of rings to let sailors know what time it was. If I remember correctly they would start at 1 on the half hour, 2 at the first hour and every hour ring 2 additional bells up to 8 at the end of 4 hours. That was a tradition since the early days of sailing ships when sailors didn’t have wrist watches. That was 47 years ago; I wonder if that still goes on these days?

Now I have several bells in the house, most of which only come out at Christmas and I ring them whenever I pass by one. After all, every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings. This year I ring them for Joyce. I know she already has her wings, but I still ring them to remind her of me.

I remember when our daughter Annie was a teenager she would be out with friends and she was always late for curfew, but always had a good excuse (at least she thought so). At Christmas time we had a long belt with large bells on it and we hung it on the front door so it would ring out when she finally came into the house. She tried everything she could think of to get in that door without sounding the alarm, but we still heard them ring.

Once when I was working at Burroughs in the product engineering lab there were old phones at several spots around the lab. They were large and had a mechanical clanger that bounced between 2 large bells inside. I was working with my oldest friend Kevin, he was back then known as the large child because of his antics at work. One time we decided the phones were too noisy being right beside us when we were working, so we went around the lab and opened all of the phones and removed one of the two bells in each phone. I had to get rid of the evidence, so I took them home with me. I kept those bells for 40 years and had them on a piece of twine, hanging in my computer room on the farm and I would tap those bells with a piece of metal and listen to the ringing until it finally faded out to nothing.