Asking for whom the bell tolls

At first it made no impression.  A distant church bell ringing, while I walked through the Madrona neighborhood yesterday afternoon.  But only a single toll of the bell, every fifteen or twenty seconds.  Once I began to notice the peculiar spacing of the tolls, and their seemingly endless succession, my blood froze.  I  jumped to a not totally absurd conclusion -- President Biden had been assassinated!

On a similarly gloomy morning in November 1963, I noticed an unusual number of radios turned on as I left the UW dorm for a chemistry class.  Waiting at an intersection, half way to class, I found myself surrounded by students holding those new-fangled transistor radios up to their ears.  "What's going on?" I asked.  President Kennedy had been shot, someone told me.  "It sounds serious."

In class, before the professor arrived, someone walked up to the blackboard and wrote that Kennedy had died.  The professor soon walked into class, saw the blackboard, and asked it it was true.  "I don't feel like talking about chemistry," he said, and walked out.  I left the building, looked up the quad toward the center of campus, and saw the flagpole.

The flag was already at half-mast.

Until then, to me at least, assassination of a president -- of any governmental officer -- was unthinkable.  The sort of thing that happened in olden times to presidents like McKinley and Garfield.  Why would anyone kill Jack Kennedy?

Back then, Republicans and Democrats seemed like opposite sides of the same coin.  Democrats were more inclined to solve problems by government action, Republicans were infatuated by the efficiency of the laws of supply and demand.  Arguments -- certainly among students -- were good natured.  We all had the same fundamental objectives; our dispute was over ways and means.  Almost everyone was white, we thought, and everyone was middle class (or on their way to becoming middle class).  America wasn't tribal.  If we had irrational thoughts at times, we tried to overcome them.  Democrats and Republicans alike agreed that facts were facts, and reality was reality.  

I had heard rumors that there was a different sort of political animal in Texas, a certain breed of folks who were quicker to anger, speedier to take offense, politically more sensitive to being subjected to governmental coercion.  But Texans were Texans, and probably just upset about no longer being the largest state in the union.  I had no particular desire to visit Dallas, but certainly would never have been held back by any fear of danger.

But that day of the booming radios -- November 22, 1963 -- brought certain underlying currents of violent discontent among certain Americans to the surface, disturbing our genial middle class complacency.  As one friend told me, a few years later, the day Kennedy was assassinated was the date when America, for him, stopped making sense.  I knew exactly what he meant.

And so yesterday's slow tolling bell of Epiphany Episcopal Church brought barely submerged worries immediately to the surface.  "It's happening again," had been my immediate, reflexive thought.  "They've killed another one of our heroes."

In today's world, of course, I carried an iPhone.  It took me only seconds of checking two or three news sources to see that no one was upset.  The headlines remained all about the future Congressional career, or lack thereof, of Marjorie Taylor Greene.  As I continued walking, my normal Madrona route soon took me right past Epiphany, where the bell was still tolling, once every fifteen or twenty seconds.  People were standing in front of the chapel, dressed in suits and dresses, talking solemnly to each other.

There had been a funeral, all right.  But not a presidential funeral.  The bell, as I later discovered on-line, was a traditional way of commemorating the deceased.  A ritual not so common nowadays, but not totally obsolete.

Back when we all lived within sight of a parish church, bells rang on three occasions to mark a person's death: the "passing bell" to warn of impending death; the "death knell" as soon as the death occurred; and the funeral toll.  It was the last of these, with the bell being rung very slowly, with a "significant gap between strikes" (Wikipedia) that had freaked me out yesterday.

I'm sorry for the deceased Epiphany parishioner and his or her mourners, appreciative of having learned something I hadn't known before about funeral customs, and overjoyed that the president remains in active good health in Washington, D.C.