One thing leads to another....

I've been re-reading THE NINE TAILORS by Dorothy L. Sayers, and if you're not familiar with her works, shame on you and pick one up. Her protagonist, Lord Peter Wimsey, is one of the best detectives ever written, and her mysteries are well written, and frustratingly twisty.

The book is about bells.

And that's pretty much my lead in. I'm going to ignore the book from now on.

I've been thinking of the tolling of the bells lately. I'm not sure why; perhaps because it was a lovely November day yesterday, with brisk temperatures and a smattering of snow; pity it's May. But whenever the weather turns that way, my mind wanders to the college campus in the little town in Missouri, and the sounds of the bells that came from Henderson Hall, at nine, at noon, at five, and at nine pm.

I especially liked them at five.
Because in the fall, with the sun almost down, it signaled the end of the day, and the beginning of my walk home.

But there was one moment in particular; Just after Christmas of 1992. The holiday hadn't gone very well, and instead of wallowing in my holiday tradition of laying on the couch in my apartment, with a shrinking stack of newly-gifted books, and a growing stack of empty pizza boxes, I decided to venture out into the night air, to gain some perspective, and of course to walk off the constant diet of pizza and soda.

The college was on a hill, and from that hill you can see every star in the sky; at least, you could back then. The world changed shortly thereafter, and many many halogen lights were put up around the small campus, turning night into day. But on that particular evening, with the campus devoid of studential distractions, it was a nice place to sit, smoke a cigarette, and muse upon my place in the universe.

Trust me; you don't want to know your place in the universe. You want to know your place in the line at the Golden Corral, but not in the universe. It's too big; it's JOE VS. THE VOLCANO huge-moon big.

Anyway, I'm sitting, musing, and I look up into a clear night sky, and wonder of wonders.....

The Aurora Borealis.
And no, that's not the male lead on BONES.

The northern lights, filling the northern portion of the sky in a masterful display of movement and color that will make you believe in the presence of a divine artist. I have to admit, it's a little unnerving, sitting and musing and wondering about your place, and looking for some kind of sign that the game is still going and BOOM! There's Aurora Borealis.

And that's when the bells began to play.

Did I mention that they usually played some kind of melody?
They did.
Happy Days Are Here Again.

Okay, sometime the divine is subtle, and sometimes the divine is not.

I'm not sure if they ever replaced the bells in Henderson Hall. A few years back, a tornado took the top of the building off; it was a domed building, and from all accounts it looked like a UFO as it sailed into the air. I went back there a year or so ago; it became important to me to show my wife the places I'd been before we met. She thought it was a charming little campus, and wondered why I would be so short sighted as to leave.

I just stared.

"Oh!" she said, "So you could meet me!"

Who am I to argue with the Divine, Mother Nature, or My Wife?