The Sound of Wind Chimes Striking a Dissonant Chord

It had the makings of a great farce.

Imagine, had I followed the poor advice of some people I know, and perpetrated a nighttime raid on the building across the way, I would have been surprised.

The idiot in me had it planned out....wait until a moonless night. Preferably when there was no wind. Sport dark clothing. Leave the house with a sack. Scale a fence or two. Grab the chimes, stow them, and return home with the stealth of a dorky cat. Only to find out. They are not our chimes.

Cooler heads prevailed. In broad daylight I walked over this morning and entered the building. There were two kids, a boy and a girl, about my kids' ages, hanging out in front of an apartment door. An apartment in which I believed resided the new possessor of the AWOL Honoka'a wind chimes.

They let me in when they saw me in the vestibule. I asked if they lived in the ground floor apartment. They nodded. "Is one of your parents home?" I asked.

"My grandma's right there," one said, pointing to the stairs.

A voice from above said, "Go get your mother."

One of the children vanished and a woman emerged. I began to explain my dilemma. She said, "Oh, we have chimes on our fire escape." One of the kids chimed in, "We got them upstate".

I had printouts from the blog and my camera had recorded the YouTube video. I had imagined many scenarios and wanted to be prepared.

The woman said, "Wait, I'll go get them."

My heart raced.

I hung with the kids and grandma.

She came out carrying our chimes. The problem was, they were not our chimes.

From fifty yards away, sure, they appeared identical. But the section at the top of the chimes, the half-coconut-looking piece, and the weight at the bottom of the chimes, were plastic-y and engraved. They looked like they were mass-produced and sold at Wal-Mart.

The woman said, "We go upstate a lot. We got these at Wal-Mart. Next time we go, we can pick some up for you, if you like."

We chatted a little longer. They know our landlords below us. I explained the prevailing theory that either the wind carried our chimes from us, or they were spirited away by a disgruntled neighbor. She gave me a knowing look that said, "it was probably your neighbor".

She offered again to pick us up chimes like these next time they traveled north. I thanked her and declined, saying that ours had been from Hawai'i and had sentimental value. She understood and wished me well. She was a very friendly and nice person. Her whole family was. It made me glad that I approached the situation cautiously.

And so endeth the lesson.

I had envisioned a different outcome....I had hoped to have retrieved the chimes, our chimes, and stowed them away in one of our closets. And then, next week, when Melanie and I were celebrating our thirteenth wedding anniversary, the chimes would have been unfurled. There would have been much rejoicing and merriment.

Instead, I called Melanie and told her they were not our chimes. She can't believe I went over there to try and get the chimes. She wants to move on.

I cannot.

Not yet, at least. A wound has been re-opened and I must heal.

Sure, you're all reading this and shaking your collective blogheads, pitying me and my fruitless obsession.

In the words of the late Kurt Vonnegut: And so it goes.

Are Those Wind Chimes I Hear, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Before we begin, I'd kindly ask you all to take a jaunt down blog-memory lane.

First, revisit this post here.

Nice, aren't they?

(And I can sense the realization that this is going to be interesting from all of you out there who remember this story.)

Next, jump ahead to this post called "Chiming In".

And then, "Chime-Chime-er-ee".

And then, "Chime Update".

And then, finally, "Further Chime Update".

The last post seen here from "The Great Wind Chime Mystery" was February 5, 2007.

Although I did post a great Wind Chime-themed poem ten days later here.

I'm sure many of you had thought that, like the sound of wind chimes on a warm breeze, the story had dissipated into memory and that was that.

Think again, my friends.

Yesterday, Melanie called me saying that, it was the weirdest thing, she thought she had heard our wind chimes. She knew it couldn't possibly be our chimes, but she thought she heard them and was sure she had imagined it.

Ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your kidneys.

When I got home, Shayna and I went to the balcony, from which our beloved chimes had disappeared 14-16 months ago.

And then I listened. If you look at the YouTube clip, you can tell they have a very distinctive sound. And I heard them. And I knew.

There. Across the courtyard. Could it be?

At the bottom of the fire escape. On the building across the way. I see something. They are wind chimes.


OUR WIND CHIMES!!!!!!!!

To be continued....

Post-Valentine's Poem

Listening last night to a love-themed podcast from The Poetry Foundation (in honor of Valentine's Day) entitled "Romantic or Plain Erotic" (available here in mp3) and I heard this poem, by Tony Hoagland. Recent readers of BillyBlog will understand why it resonated so much:

Windchime

by Tony Hoagland

She goes out to hang the windchime

in her nightie and her work boots.

It’s six-thirty in the morning

and she’s standing on the plastic ice chest

tiptoe to reach the crossbeam of the porch,

windchime in her left hand,

hammer in her right, the nail

gripped tight between her teeth

but nothing happens next because

she’s trying to figure out

how to switch #1 with #3.

She must have been standing in the kitchen,

coffee in her hand, asleep,

when she heard it—the wind blowing

through the sound the windchime

wasn’t making

because it wasn’t there.

No one, including me, especially anymore believes

till death do us part,

but I can see what I would miss in leaving—

the way her ankles go into the work boots

as she stands upon the ice chest;

the problem scrunched into her forehead;

the little kissable mouth

with the nail in it.

“Windchime” copyright �© 2003 by Tony Hoagland. Reprinted from What Narcissism Means to Me with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org

Source: What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003).

I couldn't help myself. That set of lines:

the wind blowing

through the sound the windchime

wasn’t making

because it wasn’t there

still haunts me. I have not forgotten.

Further Chime Intrigue

Well, not really, but I finally got in the backyard to see if the chimes hadn't in fact fallen and perhaps come to rest somewhere out of the line of sight. No go. Unless, of course, the chimes had fallen and a band of squirrels had dragged them off to their borough.

Here's the view from down below, looking up. The neighbor lives off the adjoining balcony (left side of the picture).



Along with a shot of the wire from which the chimes hung before they were stolen by my next-door neighbor disappeared from my balcony.

Chime Update

The mystery lingers.

Stephanie called me back this morning and I missed the call, but she did leave me the following message:

Hey Bill, this is Steph, your next door neighbor. Sorry it took me a little while to return your call. I'm sorry, I don't have your wind chimes. In fact I just assumed you guys had taken it down for a while because I haven't heard it for quite some time. Yeah, it was kind of an issue actually, but I don't have it, sorry. I guess you're gonna have to get a new one. It's been really windy so, I mean, who knows? Anyway, when you do get a new one, if it is really windy like it has been, I'd really appreciate it if you could, you know, remember to take it down because it does actually keep me up at night. My window or my bedroom is right outside of, you know, where you hang it and it does become pretty annoying. But I'm sorry I don't have it. Hopefully, I don't know, maybe if you like check downstairs or something it may have fallen or broken or something. Anyway, give me a call back if you still need to discuss it. You have my home number and, anyway, I hope it all works out and sorry and take care. Bye.

That's the message, verbatim. I removed all the "uhs" and "ums" and of course, you can't hear the stresses on words that she uses that makes her sound like she's not trying to sound annoyed, but isn't really succeeding.

So the mystery continues. Did I take them down myself and stow them somewhere in the apartment and just forget that I did so? It's possible, I guess, and more likely than the Renegade Squirrel Theory.

Unfortunately, by my own stupidity, I have opened Pandora's Box in that, now that I have documented a sort of complaint, if the chimes do show up, there is a basis for a good old-fashioned New York City neighbor dispute. We just loved those chimes.

Check this out:

No Music to Their Ears Question: The tenant below us has installed chimes on his terrace and when the wind hits the chimes they clink relentlessly. The only way my wife and I can ''turn off'' the noise is to close our windows and leave our terrace. We have asked him to remove them but he has refused. The building's management says there is nothing they can do? Is that true? .H. W., Manhattan Answer: Yes. According to Andrew McCarthy, a spokesman for the city's Department of Environmental Protection, the Noise Code does not include wind chimes as a source of noise or public disturbance.

''If the neighbor were running construction equipment or a printing press it would be a different matter and we could intercede,'' he said. ''But even though they might not like the sound of wind chimes they are not being prevented from using their balcony. This issue would have to be resolved neighbor to neighbor. We cannot go in and remove them.''

That's from the New York Times "Q & A" section, from the October 11, 1987 archives.

There have been revisions to the Noise Code, once in 1998 and attempts during the Bloomberg Administration in 2004, as well.

Wind chimes do not appear in either of these revisions, although Bloomberg applied the "reasonable person" standard. What this means is that the noise created by the chimes would disturb a "reasonable person". For example, if I kept a Howler Monkey (like the one pictured above) on my balcony, that might be disturbing to a reasonable person.

The most disturbing thing about the chimes, apparently, is that they work. They make a sound when the wind blows. Go figure.

Chime-Chime-er-eee

Just a brief windchimes update. (To catch up, read the previous post here).

Thursday evening, a week after Neighbor Stephanie's "friend" said he would give her my message, I called again, this time from the home phone, and left a long message.

I reminded her that I had basically given her implied approval to remove the chimes if she was being disturbed by them and we weren't home.

I told her they were nowhere to be found on the ground or in our apartment.

I let her know that if she did not have them, then the only logical explanataion was that someone else must have climbed up on the balcony and stolen them, and that they could climb up on her balcony and steal her things too.

I asked her to call me even if she didn't have the chimes, so at least I would know she received my message.

I asked her, if she did have the chimes, to return them. Because we didn't want to go out and buy new wind chimes if she had our old ones.

I particularly like that statement because, if nothing happens, and I do buy new chimes, they will most likely not be as pleasant as the ones that "disappeared".

I tried to sound cheery through all of this, and not at all angry. "Oh well," I chimed, "This is life in the big city, for you," or something like that.

My greatest fear is that I will discover the chimes somewhere in the apartment and remember "Oh yeah, this is where I put them on that super windy day back in November."



To be continued.....

MISSING: REWARD IF FOUND