THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

“The Bells”

“What’s up with the bells?” I asked someone who looked as if he might know something.

I live near a cathedral. I can’t hear the cathedral bells from our apartment, but I walk past the church coming and going on my walk every day and, when I got back from Mexico this spring, I discovered that one of the bells had stopped ringing.

I am sure you have heard bells like these. Sometimes the bells are now recorded, but these are the real thing. There is a short melody at a quarter past the hour and a longer one that plays at half past. At a quarter to the hour, almost the complete melody plays, but it stops early on a different note. Then, on the hour, the full melody plays. It is very satisfying.

To prevent the nearest neighbors from waking every quarter hour, the bells do not ring at night. But they ring all day long and now one of the bells is missing. I can’t imagine how the folks in the immediate neighborhood can stand it.

“What’s up with the bells?” I asked some people who looked as if they had just come out of church on Sunday. They looked at me as if I was not speaking a language they knew. “There’s one that’s not ringing. How long has that been going on?”

No idea. I asked several people, and I started to feel sorry for whichever priest had been preaching that day. If these people hadn’t even noticed the missing bell, I found it hard to believe they had absorbed a word of his sermon.

On a weekday, I was passing by the rectory. I didn’t know what a rectory was until I googled it and learned this was where the priests lived. A man in his thirties came out the door. He was not wearing a clerical collar, but I figured if he lived in the rectory, he would have to know what was going on. So I pounced.

“What’s up with the bells?”

The man looked genuinely afraid of me, and I started to wonder what it was about me that was so alarming. But that did not mean I was giving up my quest.

“The bells,” I continued. “There’s one missing. It isn’t ringing. This has been going on for weeks. I wondered if it was going to be fixed.”

The man had not stopped walking the whole while I talked.

“Um… yes. I think there are some people fixing it,” he said, scurrying away. “They came from France.”

Then he darted off into the parking lot as if he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. I was genuinely puzzled. And I wondered if, living under the bells as they did, they no longer heard them. And, if so, this did not seem like a good thing.

Because those bells are beautiful. I hear them every day, and I think of what a wonderful thing that must have been on Easter Sunday, 1915, when the cathedral was officially opened and the bells rang. I think of how proud and excited everyone must have been, and how helpful it must have been, before everyone had a phone or even a timepiece, to always know where they were in their day in such a musical way.

I’m going to take a few days off from my inquiry. There’s a chance I might be getting a reputation. But I love the bells, and I am not giving up. Those folks from France sound like they could use a little encouragement.

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