The church bell rang on Sunday morning and the church bell did not care if you were Catholic. The bell rang for everybody. The bell did not check your papers at the door. The bell was the most democratic sound on the Lower East Side because the bell traveled in all directions at the same speed and arrived at every ear at the same volume regardless of what that ear believed or did not believe.

The church was on the corner of Stanton Street and the bell was in the tower and the tower was the tallest thing on the block. The bell had been there since the building was built and the building had been built when the neighborhood was Irish and the neighborhood had not been Irish since the Italians came and the Italians had not been there since the Puerto Ricans came and the Puerto Ricans had not been there since the artists came and the artists had not been there since the money came. The bell had outlasted every population. The bell did not care who lived on the block. The bell only knew that it was Sunday.

The bell rang twelve times at noon. Each ring lasted three seconds and the silence between the rings lasted two seconds and the pattern was as reliable as a heartbeat. The first ring surprised you even though you knew it was coming. The second ring confirmed the first. By the sixth ring you had stopped counting. By the twelfth ring you had forgotten the bell was ringing. The bell worked by accumulation. One ring was a sound. Twelve rings was a weather system.

I played guitar on the corner and the church bell was the one sound I could not compete with and did not try. When the bell rang I stopped playing. Not out of respect for the church. Out of respect for the bell. The bell was louder than my guitar and older than my guitar and more certain of its purpose than I was of mine. The bell knew exactly what it was doing. The bell had been doing it for a hundred years. I had been playing guitar on that corner for thirty years and I still did not know if I was entertaining or protesting or praying. The bell did not have this problem. The bell rang. That was the entire job description. Ring on Sunday. Stop on Monday. The simplicity of the bell was the thing I envied most. One note. One job. One hundred years. I played a thousand notes and had a thousand jobs and none of them lasted a hundred years.