To Bear the Bell

My neighbor runs a literature review, Small Spiral Notebook. A few times a month she leaves a pile of books in front of her house; it never stays there long. When it's there, the pile has become a bit of a landmark, at least one person has come to rely on Felicia's discard stack to keep her well dressed in reading materials.

I always pass up the stack, mainly because I only read self help books. I've been reading "10 Days to Self Esteem" for the last 3 years. Yesterday though, because I'm becoming more interested in American history, and maybe because I no longer dismiss anyone who lived in the past as somehow made of wax, I picked up FS's edition of American Poetry from the 17th and 18th Centuries.

Ben Franklin's Drinking Song from this collection seems like a good choice for August. It is not a pretentious work. It uses a charming anachronism "to bear the bell," which I think means, as Martha Stewart would say, "to be a good thing." In the song, which is more of a rap, Franklin clearly seems to prefer the vice of drinking to those of greed, lust, and in my favorite part, power:


If this does not fit ye, let's govern the city
In power is pleasure no tongue can tell;
By crowds tho' you're teas'd, your pride shall be pleas'd,
And this can make Lucifer happy in hell!

then the Chorus:

Oh no!
Not so!
For honest souls know,
Friends and a bottle still bear the bell.

There's something delicious and strange in thinking about a founding father taking up the quill to express his ardor for drinking (with friends.) I don't handle liquor well, people who know me might think I'm being a posuer writing about this. But I do like things that bear the bell, like Felicia and her book pile, those Gowanus oyster people, purple coneflowers, the pizza at Little Tonino's, those Gowanus Loungers who've been protesting the shameful neglect of the Coney Island boardwalks and heartless evictions, the look of those Quadrozzi cement trucks (!!!) the fact that Matthew Reichers is back from England and ready to talk Buddhism, the astonishing weather today, among other things...cheers!