It's a toll road no matter which fork you take

I live across the park from Muhlenberg College.  The bells peal on the hour and when I first moved here, I admired the sound hourly, but now they're background noise, like the sound of the Fedex truck grinding up the street at 10:30 or the lady next door taking her yappers for a walk at 6 a.m. before she goes to work.  Okay, why would anyone have dogs like that?  Dogs that bark at the sunrise?  But now that I'm writing this, I think maybe they're right.  I think I'm going to start barking at the sun. As a matter of fact,  I'm going to bark at anything that makes me happy starting right now.  A nice young man was helping me clean out the garage yesterday.  I say nice young man but certain institutions would call him convict or dead beat.  Loser.   He put off cleaning the garage with me before because he had to attend an anger management class as a condition of his parole. Probably not one of the young men Obama talks about when he talks about the potential-to-society-lost when a hot-headed young man crosses paths with a hot-headed cop or vigilante.  At noon when the bells started,  my young man put down whatever he was schlepping from one side of the garage to the other and said, "Don't ask for whom the bells toll.  Because I'm not ready for them to toll for me,"  and laughed self-consciously at his unexpected literary reference.  Me too, because know-it-all horror that I am, I didn't know what poem that was from.  I never looked up its origin even though I knew it came from something something or other.  As a writer it's my job to know that stuff.    Isn't it?  

Paul, my husband, later told me the poem is by John Donne, No Man is an Island.  "Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind."  It kind of makes you wonder what people are reading in prison. Woof woof woof.

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were:

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

It tolls for thee.