the bell choir

I guess I never talked about my Tuesday evening activity - putting the set of bells back in order so maybe a bell choir can start back up. A new-ish (or she may be returning - we get a lot of people who belonged as kids, wandered away, then came back) member decided she wanted to do this; she has led bell choirs before and can arrange music for them.

So, first, the bells were inspected - the inside parts that are not metal are rubber and plastic, and those tend to perish over time, which it had, in many of the bells. There is a piece called a "spring" (it does not look like a spring, however) that controls how fast the clapper moves, and in many of the bells, it had broken, either from use in the past or from the normal breakdown of that kind of hard plastic.

(Again: I wonder how much chemistry/engineering work there is out there on what happens in plastic as it ages. I know some of the "vintage toy" collectors have some anecdotal stuff, like things about leaking plasticizer, but I wonder if it's ever been actually studied in a controlled way).

So the bells had to have some of the internal parts replaced. Fortunately, that is not that hard for even a rank amateur to do, so parts were ordered (not terribly expensive, certainly not compared to what the bells originally cost). So a group of us met to clean and  repair the bells.

I got put on cleaning duty first. The person in charge (herself a woman) wanted the women do to the polishing and the men to start on the repairs. I admit I was slightly irritated at the gendering of the tasks (but didn't say anything). I wound up wiping the brass polish off. It smelled bad (which was why I wanted to repair, not clean) and also I got tarnish all over my hands. Fortunately I had an old shirt in the car I could put on over my dress clothes or I MIGHT have refused to polish on the grounds I was wearing a new top and didn't want to spoil it. (Polishing metal is a messy business; I remember that when one of my childhood chores was periodically polishing the silver tea set my parents had but that I never saw anyone use).

Eventually, though, we got them all polished and I was able to migrate over to fixing. The one problem with fixing: removing the tiny nuts that hold the whole assembly together requires a small socket wrench, and there were only two, so that worked in a little bit of a delay. But it wasn't hard to fix the bells once I saw how it was done. (It was funny how some people were complaining a little about how "hard" it was and I was like "this is really not hard compared to a lot of things"). In the roughly 15 minutes I worked on that, I fixed two bells, which was pretty fast.

We got about half of them done. (Again, the limited number of socket wrenches - and they have to be SMALL ones - was a big chokepoint). There will be another day to do the rest.

But it was fun. Yes, even with some people complaining a little, it was mostly good-natured complaining. And I like tasks like that, where you can just settle down and work and you can see the results of your work right away. (I think this is also why I find cleaning house satisfying, at least once I can bash through the inertia surrounding getting started). And it's just fun doing something as a group. That may be something our culture has forgotten - there used to be things like "bees" (whether quilting or threshing or some other task). And I remember fondly getting together with another family to plant and harvest potatoes when I was a kid.

The other thing is, I am going to sort of get something I had talked about wanting in the nebulous future - to be part of a group that did something with music (I had talked about a civic choir, which we don't really have). The bell choir might fulfill that. The person in charge said we could commit to just one performance, and if we didn't like it, we could drop out - or we could keep going, she can arrange the music to work with more or fewer people. So it will be interesting and hopefully by being up there with others I will get past some of my stage fright in re: performing music (it is weird how I can get up and read, or speak off the cuff even, and have no problem with doing it before a crowd, but throw an instrument in there and I'm terrified. Perhaps I don't trust the instrument not to betray me? I don't know. I do know I have similar, but lesser, misgivings sometimes about having to demonstrate something tricky to a class - like getting the dialysis tubing to open up so you can make a "model cell" - it doesn't always go smoothly)