A Joyful Noise Unto the Lower Garden District
I was eating lunch in my car today in front of St. Theresa of Avila Church at Coliseum Street and Erato in New Orleans when the sound of Christmas carols radiated from the bell tower. This Catholic place of worship is close to my office. I have listened to this bell many times. At noon each day, but never exactly at noon, usually a couple of minutes early, bells ring out, assuring the neighborhood there is time, in spite of everything, for faith and redemption.
Today, the second song was “Silent Night.” I rolled down my car window. A storm had just passed. Streets were wet, the sky gray and the clouds low and heavy, an atmospheric condition in which moist air carries sounds far down neighborhood streets, across lawns and porches and through windows.
As notes from the tower rang out, small mistakes in the carols, gaps in musical timing and the occasional too soft or too loud note sounded like someone might be at an organ keyboard, playing these tunes live.
I have sometimes wondered if a church organist were inside playing these songs that sound like bells. Today, I was thinking about knocking on the door and asking questions when I saw the church priest emerge next door from an old, three-story Tudor parsonage, which, after a hundred or so years of holding itself up, leans this way and that as if designed by Dr. Seuss. He approached the front steps of the church. I got out of the car. He saw me coming. I met him on the steps before he could escape through heavy, rust-red doors.
The priest, a timid, pale, slight man with semi-transparent skin, who might have been any age between 30 and 72, sized me up with the look of someone who was pretty sure he was about to be mugged. I politely asked about the bells. He smiled and confessed, “We have a system. We play a system that makes the bells. Oh, we have a real bell and you can climb the tower and see it (theoretically I could climb up, but he wasn’t offering), but it doesn’t work.”
I could tell he really wanted to get inside, out of the wind and threatening weather. I assured him the sounds were beautiful and appreciated, regardless of their source. They lent charm to this historic neighborhood. “Good King Wenceslas” played imperfectly in February from a store-bought system somehow carried a humble sincerity that made the soft blanket of a rainy day in New Orleans all the more comforting.
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.