Phthursday Musings: I'm Thinking About My Doorbell
or, He sowed the frozen turf of the north, though nothing bloomed
This is my doorbell:
It works.
And yet it feels like NOBODY USES IT.
Last night a delivery person showed up with bags of groceries. No, we don’t usually have groceries delivered, but we did last night. When this person showed up, they put the groceries along the front walk and telephoned. THE DOORBELL WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE PERSON’S FACE BUT THE PERSON DID NOT PRESS IT.
The telephone call came from “Saint Ansgar, Iowa” which sounds like the epicenter of all YOUR WARRANTY HAS EXPIRED CALLS so no, I did not answer the phone. My wife saw the person though so realized what was happening. AND YET THE DOORBELL COULD MERELY HAVE BEEN TOUCHED, DARE I SAY POKED.
This, incidentally, is Saint Ansgar:
See how he holds aloft the House of the Lord? Verily do I say that he knew how to ring a few good doorbells! He tried to convert the whole of Scandinavia, for crying out loud! Do you think he just stood outside Danish mudhuts ringing them up from a mysterious phone number in the Hamburg area, hoping someone would answer?
I mean, there probably weren’t a lot of doorbells in Scandinavia in the year 855, but I’m sure he engaged in whatever the appropriate ninth century equivalent was!
All that said, why exactly was he wandering around Scandinavia with a tiny church? How small did he think the Swedes were??
I digress.
Look:
I realize that the doorbell is a double edged sword. I mean, it’s not a sword at all. It’s a rectangle, it has four edges. I guess more properly it has eight edges. It is a three-dimensional object, after all. Please note that the nature of the thing is such that four of its edges are obscured so we don’t count those. Also please note that I am talking edges not faces and I am certainly not talking about vertices.
Anyway.
I am trying to acknowledge that a lot of people don’t really want to deal with the doorbell going off. My wife, for example, handles the chime by leaving the living room so as to not have to deal with whomever might be on the other side of the door.
Nevertheless we do not want the norms of the world to conform to that sort of thinking. That is my job.
My compatriot Ramses also reports hating when the doorbell is rung. To this I have offered a simple suggestion: REMOVE YOUR DOORBELL! This is an eminently simple suggestion and I hereby make it to all good citizens. Even to all bad citizens.
If you do not want to have the doorbell rung for any reason, then the modern norms are such that, well, just don’t have one. But when one is present, and when you find yourself delivering precious cargo like strawberries or N size batteries, announcing the presence of such cargo via the most basic of communications methods is expected.
Now I do not go so far as to suggest anything like the postal delivery person also ringing the doorbell! But postal delivery is a different beast entirely, for a mailbox, or mail slot, is presumably involved. The post office does not scatter credit card solicitations or those coupon pouches full of HVAC “deals” all over your lawn, now do they? No, that sort of thing is only done by the people who deliver those ridiculous ad inserts inside the pink plastic bags, chucking them here and there like they’re trying to lose a game of Paperboy. And let me tell you, if I’m ever elected to the Village Board in this town, I’m going to pass an ordinance whereby that bullshit is treated like the public littering it is.
I have had contractors claim in the past that they came to the house but nobody was home. I knew this to be nonsense - I work from home and am fastidious about being home when someone is scheduled to arrive (even if I’m not always the absolute greatest at being on time to a place myself) - but what I have come to believe is that on at least a couple occasions, people showed up while I was on the phone or whatever, and did something asinine like tap at the door, instead of, you know, RINGING THE DOORBELL, THE LONG ESTABLISHED WAY OF ANNOUNCING ONE’S PRESENCE AT ANOTHER PERSON’S HOME, AND INDEED, MOST CONSISTENT WITH THE ACTUAL EXISTENCE OF THE DOORBELL ITSELF.
Incidentally you may have noticed there are several filled-in holes surrounding my doorbell. The implication is that other doorbells predated the current one. I mean, there are enough holes that one must imagine at least two other doorbells once resided on this siding. (I estimate the age of the siding to be about 25-30 years, but hey, what do I know.)
Years ago when I first tried to run for public office, I went door to door collecting signatures to get on the ballot. I found in one neighborhood where the homes were a little older that a lot of the doorbells were in some state of disrepair or another. This was at the time sincerely weird to me. I’d never previously thought about the idea of a house without a working doorbell, because I’d never lived in such a place!
At our last home, I had to replace the front doorbell at some point. The old hard-wired one didn’t work. I replaced it with one where the doorbell would pass some radio wave or something and then the actual chime was something plugged into a wall inside the house.
This incidentally brings up an interesting point. WHAT IS A DOORBELL? Because the thing on the outside of the house has no bell in it. It is a button! But the correct way to understand everything is that the button is part of the doorbell. See how weird terminology is? We say “press the doorbell” when we really mean “press the button near the door which will cause a bell or bell-like sound to eminate within the house” but who would actually talk like that besides Immanuel Kant?
What would Immanuel Kant do if Saint Ansgar showed up at his front door carrying a tiny church? That’s right: HE WOULD DO NOTHING UNLESS ANSGAR RANG THE DAMN DOORBELL FIRST.
Obligatory:
He sowed the frozen turf of the north, though nothing bloomed
The above is part of a memorial to Saint Ansgar as I located on this page and my goodness does that not sound like the way I’d want to be remembered.
Though I suppose being remembered as a Saint would be cool?
And I know you are wondering, as I was: What is Saint Ansgar, Iowa’s claim to fame?
Well.
In 1980 the local townsfolk spotted an albino deer. The deer was “allowed to wander unrestricted” until one day, in 1988, the deer died.
At which time they took it, taxidermied it, and put it on display in a little gazebo.
I am not making this up. Read about it here and there are even pictures here and well here’s one from when the deer was alive:
I think what has me most baffled here is the claim that the deer was allowed to “wander unrestricted” for eight years. I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to figure out exactly where you want to go with the obvious jokes here.
About three paragraphs ago the thought occurred to my poor wife: We are not going to see the stuffed white deer.
We’ll see about that. I kind of think we will. And hey, maybe if we order groceries again, we can get a good tip as to where to eat in Saint Ansgar. And in return can ask the delivery person WHEN YOU GONNA RING IT, WHEN YOU GONNA RING IT? I mean, maybe not quite like that. But, maybe.
Is Substack's "like" button like a doorbell? Pushing the "like" button announces one's presence on the page.