Restoration and Ritual: The Saga of the Bell

Part 1: Restoration

Have I told you about the bell?

When my sister bought a shelf on Facebook Marketplace, the seller said, "I have this giant old rusty ship's bell I've been trying get rid of. Want it for $20?"

Amused, my sister shared the bell offer in our family group text. But what practical or even impractical purpose could a giant old tarnished bell have? Buying the bell could mean taking on a big piece of junk I now had to re-home. It was a terrible idea. I already pursue more hobbies than I have time for. Could my life really be missing... a big old beat-up bell? The answer was no. Unequivocally no.

I told my sister I wanted it.

The bell carried layers of scratches and tarnish and pockmarks, measured a foot tall and a foot in diameter, and had been cast in solid bronze. It weighed at least 70 pounds. It also had no mount—two steel bolts stuck out at the bottom. Without a base to bolt into, it would never ring.

But I decided to make it shine.

Not thinking to take advantage of library books like How to Restore & Repair Practically Anything or Care and Repair of Everyday Treasures, I started cheap, determined not to spend much money on this wild and inadvisable project. Supposedly one can polish bronze using a paste of flour and vinegar. This turned out to be insufficient.

Had I wanted a more avant-garde finish I could have left the bell with streaks of teal and pink and white, but darn it, I wanted shiny. Really, truly shiny.

I soaked the bell in a citric acid solution for three days. Every day the bell looked different and the solution turned green and then yellow, until finally all the patina came off the metal, leaving raw, unpolished bronze. Which is the color of canned tuna. Not particularly attractive.

But there's something to be said for knowing the inner essence of an object, to know exactly where you're starting before you begin the work in earnest.

After several frustrating trips to the hardware store and one metal splinter that sent me to urgent care (pro tip: wear gloves), I started the real labor of polishing the bell. By hand.

It was grueling, and I do not recommend it. However, the more you work on a thing with your hands, the more you imbue it with connection to yourself, and thus the more personal of an object it becomes.

When I worked over the surface of the bell with a wire brush, its hidden properties emerged. The familiar bronze color and a hint of shine showed.

Stopping there would have been a worthy transformation. Unfortunately, having watched many time-lapse internet videos of objects going from rusty and tarnished to a true mirror finish, I wasn't satisfied. A matte finish could never be enough.

I spent the next three weeks going over the bell with multiple grades of sandpaper, from coarse to fine to finer, bringing the bell's finish closer to that fabled clear reflection. Sometimes, during a bout of sanding, a single drop of sweat would fall from my forehead onto the gleaming surface, strengthening the physical bond between me and the object. Spending an hour sanding the bell each day became a kind of ritual—which, it turned out, would be key to the bell's final purpose.

Despite the mirror finish remaining always just out of reach, at a certain point, I had to say "It's not perfect, but it's awesome. Time to move on."

And the finish I settled on was indeed awesome.

Part 2: Ritual

Fulfilled that my exhausting work had produced results, I now faced the second hurdle: making the bell actually ring. While polishing it, I'd pondered how to mount it, and ultimately decided to honor the bell's mythic-feeling provenance with a base that looked like a boat—to give its new home a full-circle quality.

To hold up 70 pounds or more, no flimsy premade home decor vessel would do. This meant I had to build my own ship.

My house's previous owners had left a lot of scrap wood in the basement, so I dove right in. Instead of, you know, reading a book like The Art and Craft of Wood. Or Build More Stuff with Wood. Such prudent, reasonable methods would only slow me down.

As I built and painted the ship base and sifted through basement hardware for small caps and washers to add embellishment, I continued to scratch my head about the bells' purpose. "Ring it on special occasions, like birthdays or New Year's" didn't feel like often enough. But the bell also felt too special to be rung for just any occasion.

Thankfully, I'd been enjoying answering the inevitable "What's new?" at social events with "I'm restoring an old ship's bell and I don't know what to do with it."

My sister-in-law gave the revelatory suggestion of using the bell to celebrate personal achievements. I adopted the idea immediately and also extended it: ring to mark both the completions and the beginnings of voyages of personal significance. The settings of sail and the comings to port, so to speak.

Finally, the bell had a purpose.

With the base painted and the bell as restored as I could manage, its first ring was to celebrate its own completion.

And what a ring this bell has. If you peal it loudly enough, it will resound a clear A/E tone for more than 30 seconds. It is a powerful object, built to signal over great distances of open water, and you feel that power when you ring it. The bell means something.

Throughout ringing it for my own accomplishments and, just as fulfilling, watching others ring it for theirs, I came to understand the bell embodied a real significance. The act of marking a beginning or ending physically, with an object you can touch, with heft not just in your head but in the tangible world, made these milestones more real—there's nothing like a loud gonglike sound to make starting a life change or completing a goal carry a lot more weight. The moment is solidified and deepened by the ritual.

Which is, of course, a very, very old idea. Humans have been practicing rituals for untold thousands of years. And rituals need not be religious or mystical or magical. They can deepen everyday acts, or they can make life more worth living. They can act as supports for wellness or strengthen bigger ceremonies.

Even if we don’t always realize it, I believe we crave ritual. We need to feel that our actions are significant and meaningful. We need to tangibly affirm our accomplishments and even our very existence. We do so by using everything from weddings to pride parades to holidays to a morning cup of tea. Ritual can make the sometimes evasive or abstract meaning of our lives tactile, visible, and audible. A meaning you can literally hold in your hand.

In the end, the whim of restoring a bell to make my life more interesting did so much more. I formed an unexpectedly deep connection with an object through the difficult work of my hands. I felt with my ears how powerful it is to make a milestone literally resound. And I gained a new way to experience, both for myself and with others, that the meaning our lives hold is not merely in our heads or even in our hearts—that it's out there, in the real world. Waiting for us to touch it.

By James D., West Windsor Branch