Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New
Ring Out the Old, Ring in the New
Looking inside the boxes in the dark closets in the back rooms...
The cardboard box sits in the corner of my office taped shut, with a black-magic-marker scrawl noting its content: BELLS. It’s been a year and a half since I moved from my house-parent apartment at a boarding school to my boyfriend’s house. The bell-box had already been taped shut, had remained taped shut since I’d moved it the time before that, five years earlier. It is possible that the bells have lived in that box in their protective crumpled-paper cocoons since the previous move, eight years before (for a total now of nearly fifteen years?), although as I rack my sluggish brain, a dim image of the bells unwrapped, out of the box, and on half-committed display in that long-abandoned townhouse floats into my awareness like the pyramid-shaped die inside of a Magic Eightball: reply hazy, try again. It could be a true memory, but no amount of prodding seems to result in greater detail: concentrate and ask again.
Let’s go with it, then: the bells, at some point during the eight years that I lived in the townhouse, were unwrapped (by me, certainly, even though I can’t remember it) and placed in the wooden display-case that my father kindly built for that purpose. The case was never mounted on a wall, as it was intended to be, because the prospect of hanging a wooden case full of glass and ceramic objects on a wall was too harrowing for me to manage. I just kept imagining the crash of the case to the floor. Therefore, the case was firmly and unperilously set atop a sturdy piece of furniture, where it also is today, in a different house, in a different city. The case, as I write this, is empty, the bells, along with a number of other displayable trinkets, living still in cardboard-boxed obscurity.
Out of sight in their box, the bells stay largely out of mind, too. The times that I look in the direction of the box and actually see it—see it for what it contains—a tide of something like dread and guilt and resentment floods my insides. Why? (Eightball: cannot predict now.) If anyone else were to unpack it, the contents would seem fairly unremarkable. A small collection of handbells, maybe ten or fifteen. A few of them are glass; a few are rough cast-brass like the ones that Pier 1 Imports used to stock in droves when I was little, with ancient, faded, stiff ribbons tied to their tiny loop-handles; a few are ceramic with whimsical, painted decorations—a Christmas scene, spring flowers. None bears an inscription or any specific information; if I’d been a good and faithful curator of my own past, I would have seen to this, for some of the bells commemorate achievements, and the rest were gifts from relatives. My memory—which we’ve established is uncooperative—is the sole source of the meaning of these objects, and both memories and objects are now awash in a brew of emotions they hardly seem to warrant.
§
I did not want a bell collection. I don’t remember ever wanting a collection of anything. I have always been the sort of person who can’t choose, if put on the spot, a favorite color, and who, as a child, seriously agonized over the problem of making any of my stuffed animals feel left out or sad by showing favor to one. Oh, the guilt! Deciding that I liked any single thing enough to ask for a whole collection of it strikes me now as having been beyond my capability. Also beyond me: realizing that when an adult said, “oh, you have some bells! You must like bells! You must be starting a bell collection!” it was possible to say, “no, I don’t want to collect bells. I just happen to have some right now.” Once an adult—in this particular case, the adult in question was my grandmother—had decided that a bell would be a good birthday or Christmas gift for me, what could I say but “thank you”? Which naturally led to the receipt of more bells.
This is more or less how the bells accrued. As a kid, I was only minimally able to note, in the tide of my life’s affairs, that thoughts, feelings, wishes, and fears were often attributed to me by members of my family without my expressing much of anything or having been asked my opinion. I rarely knew whether I felt the way I was supposed to feel—or was believed to feel. I may have gone along with a lot of assumptions and projections because they issued from adults I loved and knew I was supposed to please. Pleasing people mainly meant not contradicting them, it seemed, even when they asserted things about me that weren’t true.
Like most kids (I guess?), I believed that the adults were in charge of themselves. I believed that what they told me was, as a rule, wisdom derived from experience. My grandmother told me that the way to conquer shyness—an affliction I was told I had, and that she shared—was to force yourself to do exactly what you didn’t want to do. “You see, Jenny,” she said, “when I’m standing in line at the grocery store, I make myself talk to the other people in line. I compliment someone’s outfit or their hairstyle and start a little conversation.” She’d then demonstrated, and I’d seen, yes, how easy it was to seem cheery and friendly, not that I entertained for one second a notion of trying her technique. No way. Out in the car, she’d cracked the window and lit a cigarette immediately. “Now, I hate being put on the spot to say the prayer in Sunday School class,” she’d continued, “so I learned a prayer by heart, and anytime I get volunteered, I can say my prayer.” I knew she hated surprises. Once, one of my aunts tried to plan a surprise birthday party for her and her twin sister, but she got wind of it and all hell broke loose. I like to imagine (because this happened during the first cultural heyday of Mr. T) my grandmother, all puffed up in her 5’3” frame, issuing a warning in no uncertain terms, “I pity the fool who tries to throw me a party!” But that’s adult-me talking; at the time, it was more dire than funny. Caught off guard, none of her well-plotted strategies worked to soothe her.
My grandmother, I can see now, managed her own severe anxieties by making her world as definite and unambiguous as she could. She strove to be correct, and a way to be certain you were correct when it came to the emotionally risky territory of gift-giving was to determine a category of concrete items that would suit the recipient. Fixing on a category meant that the item’s particulars didn’t matter so much; anything in the category would do. Collectibles neatly fit that bill. Even the Magic Eightball that lived in her guest-room closet said: you may rely on it. And so, she gave me bells once or twice a year for a while; other family members sometimes followed suit. It was easy.
She hadn’t invented the idea of bells as a collection for me, though—that distinction goes to my piano teacher, kind Mrs. Golden, who cannot be blamed for it. She was a gentle and patient woman, wiser in the ways of children than most of the adults I knew, though unlike most, she had no children of her own. She offered bells for achievements each year at our recital: most improved, most practice time, best overall performance. I was like a case-study in the effects of positive reinforcement; I earned the first thimble-sized brass bell for playing the best among the students in my level. As I’m sure was the intent of the prize, I felt proud and inspired to work a little harder. I put in more practice time, which I documented for her in a small notebook she checked each week, drawing a smiley-face of praise to mark my efforts (Eightball: outlook good). The extra work translated to more rewards—more bells—and each year, I would devote myself more, until at last, I won something akin to “Best in Show,” and with it, a large, graceful etched-glass bell that I truly did think was beautiful in its own right. Had my bell collection been limited to trophies that I’d earned, it would now have, I’m sure, an emotionally uncomplicated place in my life. It’s what happened after I got the first bell that’s the problem.
Once I’d unwrapped a couple of Christmases-worth of bells to add to the piano trophies, I may have started agreeing when people assumed I collected them, as, in the passive sense, it was true. I existed, and bells collected around me, though not quickly, and not in staggering numbers (thank goodness!). Nonetheless, I possessed for several years the peculiar-to-me identity-facet I shall call “girl who collects bells for no good reason.” The only thing that provided a kind of meaning or sense of normality to this identity was that other people had similar facets. A lot of people seemed to collect items, as if there were some real payoff or distinction in being able to say, “I have one of every PEZ dispenser ever made between 1971 and 1981,” or some such thing. But the passion other people felt for their collections, the drive to acquire a new piece and the delight they seemed to take in looking for the next one—I’ve never felt it. The closest I’ve come is with books, and even then, even after years of building a strange and eclectic library that I packed, ported, unpacked, and shelved in several places, I sold most of them off when I left the boarding school, that move that failed to shed the box of bells again. I sold and gave away my books because books come and go, right? Just like other objects come and go, are lost or broken or lose their meaning over time. Just like people come and go, happily or tragically or by accidents of time, attention, location. Just like my grandmother and Mrs. Golden are gone, now, from my life and from the world, physically gone but still collected here on the page for the record. I keep things, keep people, and then, after some amount of time, I let them go.
§
At the beginning of this essay, I said I was writing from the office that contained the unopened box of bells, that the present moment was only a year and a half since I’d left my job at the boarding school. That’s only partly true. I did write that paragraph then, and a whole essay following from it, which I called “The Bells, Bells, Bells,” because reading Mr. E. A. Poe’s poem of that title calls forth in me roughly the same feeling of desperately wanting to bail as the sight of that box did at the time. But now, I have to confess that the “now” of this essay is five years in the future of that first paragraph. As I write this “now,” the bells are long gone, but the general air of uncertainty remains: what did I do with them? Why? And why don’t I confidently remember? (Eightball: better not tell you now.) When I first wrote about them, I was in the middle of a reckoning with loads of objects I had, for thirty years, packed, ported around the eastern half of the country, unpacked, displayed, stuffed in closets, forgotten about, and, mostly, rued having rediscovered. I had come to wonder why I had done or should continue doing any of that.
I had come to wonder about the meaning of the things I carried, and especially why I kept choosing to hold onto things that I thought I should treasure but didn’t, or maybe why I kept failing to get rid of whatever I no longer needed, anything that weighed me down by failing to mean what I wished it meant. Oh, how convoluted these heirlooms, these gifts and hand-me-downs can be! I wanted those bells from my grandmother to be tokens of her love for me, but all they ever said was I don’t know what you really want, and I’m afraid to ask. I kept them as long as I kept wishing things in my life had been different (Eightball: don’t count on it) without understanding why they hadn’t been.