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!

Lonelyville not so Lonely

I've visited the amazing Lonelyville garden twice. It's been open for a couple of weeks. Every time I go more people have found it. Like all the bees that are harvesting from the well-tended and gracefully arranged plants which include beebalm, cone flowers, hostas, hibiscus, hydrangea, impatiens.....and many more. Lonelyville, on PPSW near Vanderbilt, faces Prospect Park, and you can sit in front in an Adirondack chair and let your dog drink from the water bowl at your feet.

What can I say? It's a gift to the neighborhood. On Tuesday my daughter and I got to hang out with lots of other kids and caretakers in the garden and enjoy the collection of black and yellow vintage toy trucks that were parked near the base one of the giant planters. (The planter contained a plant with flowers that were color-coordinated with the toys parked at its base...that's Lonelyville!) One child started playing with the hose that someone had left out, but was lured away from it before the kids started to fight over it, and before anyone's laptop got drenched.


I met a teacher who was there with his son, who told me about his plan to start an ESL/Art high school. A man with a vision who wanted to talk. What a treat! He had a lot of nice things to say about the Grassroots Festival he and his wife and son had just been to in Ithaca. He told me Arrested Development had played. I sat in a fog for a minute trying to figure where I had heard that name before until the TV show came to mind. Duh.

The truth is, Lonelyville is magic. (That's right, like Jesus, Sarah Silverman!) I don't really want to think so. I don't trust places with such a precise aesthetic (I have a neurotic fear of design snobbery, or any kind of snobbery), I'm jealous of their thermos collection, and my husband still complains about one of the women who served him coffee being sarcastic to him because he forgot his change (so he can be a little absent minded, he's got a lot going on...are you always perfect?) But I know it is magic because when I walk through the door I go through a time/space warp and am no longer in Brooklyn. I've landed upstate or somewhere. But I don't have to worry about how to get home.