Excerpt of Going On Nine by Catherine Fitzpatrick

Among the obligations for which I was held accountable as a child was the ability to discern between the sounds of all the bells I could ignore and the one bell I must heed. Early on, I calculated how long I could safely ignore the bell I was to never ignore. The algorithm was simple. After I heard Mom ring her old bell and before I dawdled home for dinner, I could flip six more baseball cards against a wall with Davey Lofton or pop eight more tar bubbles with Melinda Potter. I could shore up the wall of a plundered fort with Janice Haverkamp, add three flowers to a clover-chain necklace with my sister, or scoop two tadpoles into a mayonnaise jar with Rainer Niesen. Our family lived in a white brick house in suburban St. Louis, in a neighborhood filled to overflowing with children. My friends and I had a thousand ways to fill a summer day. Released from the obligations and rote recitations of school, we entertained ourselves for long stretches of time with rudimentary equipment and minimal supervision. We nailed boards to fissured oak trees, constructing ramshackle platforms that ac¬corded us bird’s-eye views. We spread blankets in the shade and brought out cookies and jugs of iced lemonade. We knelt on bald dirt by the fence lines, shoveling Missouri clay into mountains, valleys, and winding canals. We played tag and hide-and-seek across eight back yards, hop¬scotch on driveways, and kickball in the street. We crawled through garage windows and helped ourselves to Popsicles out of chest freezers humming in musty darkness. We made pilgrimages to Snyder’s Five & Dime to swipe root beer barrels from open boxes Mr. Snyder situated conveniently near the door so our petty thievery would not disrupt the paying customers. We were scabby and sweaty, chigger-bit at the waist, and mosquito-bit everywhere else. We didn’t care. It was summer. In the late afternoon, parents stood on front stoops and rang, clanged, chimed, and whistled us home for dinner. Each child recognized his or her distinct summons—the sound that meant a meatloaf was nicely brown and crusty or a tuna noodle casserole was bubbling under a topping of crumbled chips. Mrs. Pearson rang the first bell. She had never been blessed with children of her own, but having taught school for forty years, she knew that children require ample time to stop doing what they want to do and start doing what they have to do. Lieutenant Lofton lowered a pristine Amer¬ican flag from a pole in his front yard and then rang a nautical bell— ting-ting, ting-ting—as if marking a sailor’s watch at sea. The lieutenant kept a shine on the brass so the words he’d had engraved there were clear: In Memory of the USS Indianapolis Mr. and Mrs. Daily carried out two TV tray tables on which they had arranged a set of graduated hand bells. After slipping their fingers into white cotton gloves, they each picked up two bells and held them upright. Then Mr. Daily stretched his arm forward and made a single, circular motion, producing the first note in a crystalline pealing that res¬onated across the neighborhood. Mrs. Warfield dreamed of studying at the Julliard School in New York City, but life sometimes interferes with dreams, and so she wound up in the suburbs of St. Louis with a husband and a baby, and she was not at all unhappy. Each evening at suppertime, Mrs. Warfield waited on her porch for the neighbors’ dissonant chimings and clankings to fall silent. Then, with a bit of fanfare, she raised a metal triangle and struck it with a slender rod, sending out a score of staccato plinks. It was her nightly concerto. Mrs. Zaldoni lumbered out from her kitchen with a rolling gait, whacked the bottom of a pasta pot with a wooden spoon, and lumbered back again. The aroma of Bolognese sauce accompanied her at all times. Up at Snyder’s Five & Dime, Mr. Snyder always rang the final bell of the day. Fifteen minutes before closing time, the balding little man pulled the chains of a shopkeeper bell mounted just outside his store. Mr. Snyder believed that children who might wish a late-day candy purchase—a ribbon of dots or a Baby Ruth bar—had a right to know they must hurry.