angels.

There is an old myth—you’re probably quite familiar—that whenever a bell rings, an angel gets its wings. To me that is one precious notion. Whenever my push to the aluminum-framed glass entry door at my local Ace hardware causes the string of attached bells to jingle, it doesn’t just indicate to the clerk that a customer has arrived, but also that a messenger of God in some distant corner of the cosmos has had two new and oddly inhuman limbs added. A young child, freshly free of training wheels, may fall from his or her bicycle and in the process break a clavicle or severely chip the one adult tooth that has already arrived. It’s utterly dreadful, right? Well, not if the young child’s thumb or arm happened to graze the bell affixed to the handlebars on the way down. If that’s the case, this mild medical emergency is actually a cause for heavenly choirs to break into million-part harmony.

Being struck as I obviously am by the link between bells and angel promotion, I long ago invested a meager few dollars in a teacher’s bell. It sat right next to my computer monitor. With the flat of my palm I descended upon its shiny, top-loaded button multiple times each day and basked in the high tone that it produced. It was nice to know that even when I had writer’s block or had grown too weary to continue my study of real estate, I could at least accomplish something by ringing that bell. Sure, I might not have remembered offhand the sequence of quantitative adjustments or the differing costs associated with split-faced concrete block verses slump block, but maybe with one of my many rings, I told myself, I had helped my long-deceased great grandmother Opal finally attain senior status amongst the many other less fortunate and flightless spirits of heaven. Sometimes I’d ring the bell a lot. I’d dedicate minutes at a time. It was mostly due to my notion that if some departed legend like Jimi Hendrix or John Lennon was going to get angel wings, I wanted to be the one to grant the privilege. That way, when we finally meet, they’ll owe me one—redeemable in the form of a celestial jam session employing cloud guitars and drum sets made from leftover halos.

I do have to wonder, however, if my ringing hasn’t been a little on the excessive side. At its height, I was ringing that bell a few dozen, maybe even a few hundred, times a day (at which point my wife left to find less compulsively tintinnabulative company). I think that it’s a distinct possibility that at some juncture all my ringing caused heaven’s supply of qualified angel candidates to become entirely depleted. After that crucial breaking point, the surpassing of which was unknown to me at the time, I imagine that each of my rings subsequently forced heaven’s hand, compelling it to obey its own laws, dictating the promotion of heavenly beings that, in some cases, might not have been ready for the duties of angel. I think the proof of this theory’s veracity can be seen in the recent and corresponding up-tick in accidents the world over. Car wrecks, spilled milk, twisted ankles, random impalement of individuals by formerly roof-bound icicles, diarrhea, balding, hemorrhoids, sunburns, bad haircuts, bad jokes, the unintended announcement by the guest of a future surprise party the existence of said party to the subject of said party, the proliferation and misspelling of the word “dog” to refer to one’s close associates, or whatever else—would all be the direct result of inexperienced guardian angels missing their vital cues in preventing bad things from transpiring. I am ashamed to say that, unfortunately, during mid- to late-2007 I was doing a whole heck of a lot of bell ringing right before the onset of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and can’t help but feel a little bit responsible.

The bell is gone now. I never ring it anymore. I’ve seen too much carnage. Maybe some day, when the work force of qualified candidates for angel-hood are not in such short supply, I will fetch the bell from its perch in the closet atop all the boxes of still-in-cellophane board games we got ourselves a few Christmases back when we were briefly convinced that board games are fun. But for now, I’m on a quest. It’s a quest to find the antithesis to the bell ring. If the beautiful, chimey noise of bells can grant angels wings, there must be some opposite noise, some direct reciprocal whose acoustic characteristics are entirely contrary to the splendor of the bell ring, a sound that can perhaps serve as a sort of aural antidote if you will, a sound that has power to dispossess angels of their wings in an similar, though inverse, fashion. So far, my hunches tell me that farts just might do the trick.