The Bell

I know it's hard to believe, but there was a time when, if your mother wanted to reach you, she didn't call you on your cell phone. Back then, you were lucky if your mom knew the phone number to your friends home. For that matter, I can remember times, when she'd have been lucky to know where I was at all.



So when we were young and not permitted to venure too far from the house, we had the bell. It was an old hand held school bell that my mother picked up somewhere, and when she wanted us to come home, usually for dinner, she'd walk out back and ring the bell. You'd be surprised how far you can hear one of those things.

We'd be sitting on our bikes, down at the loading docks of the textile factory, talking, aruging, telling lies, when we'd hear the bell.

"Gotta go," we'd yell, hop on our bikes and race home.

The bell wasn't only my mother's tool. If one of us happened to be in the house and she wanted the other children, she'd just ask one of us to ring the bell. You'd grab it from a shelf over the kitchen sink, walk out the back door, through the closed in porch till you stood on the back steps. Then you'd ring the hell out of that bell. It made your ears ring as well.

I never thought anything about it at the time, but now that I think back, I don't recall any of my other friends being called home with a bell. It's a little von Trapp family if you think about it. I have no idea where my mother got the idea to call us home with a bell.