This unassuming object played, and continues to play, a consequential part in my life. It's a plain brass bell, unadorned, maker and age unknown. It's not musical but when properly agitated it can make a helluva loud noise. It was given to my mother in 1947 by her mother, my grandmother, Sonia Green. How my grandmother came into possession of the bell, I don't know and can't imagine. A mystery.
I begged it sometime in the late 1960s and have owned it ever since,
My family spent the summers of 1947-48-49 at Makamah Beach on the north shore of Long Island. It was the high point of my childhood; I've written about those glorious summers right here. The function of the bell was to call me and my two brothers in for lunch or dinner. The clang traveled well even against the whoosh of the wind and the rhythm of the surf. There I'd be, all alone, studying shells or snails somewhere along the shore or on a sandbar, hungry, and I'd hear the insistent jangle and hurry home. My brother Jon says that to this day he can't hear the peculiar noise of this bell without salivating.
The bell was equally useful, a generation later, when my own independent, wild children wandered freely around our Hackett Hill property. It rang, they returned. I wonder if they associate its sound with corn-on-the-cob and hamburgers. They have ample reason to do so.
And even now, of summers, when it's the hour for food, or just time to call the day to a close, out comes the bell, and children, grandchildren, and guests respond to its harsh but historic call.
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