I was new to the campus when the campus was still being built.

I remember when the Carillon Tower first appeared. The Tower established Pride of Place, and towered over the neighborhood, visible from the other end of the city and the valley which contained it.

We got to take the tour early in the beginning, talked with the carillonneur who proudly lectured about his art, his skill, his instrument.

If I remember correctly, he told us how he trained in Europe, because that’s where the bell towers are, still played, and in America there are too few options.

He was one of a select fraternity of carillonneurs and jumped at the chance when UCR built a tower for him.

He showed us how the mechanism worked, and played for us, pounding the keys, stomping the pedals. He gave us “Freude schoener Götterfunken” from the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. He was no Quasimodo ringing the bells of Notre Dame. The music rang out over the campus, over the city, across the valley.

The citizens of Riverside pricked up their ears, claimed the sound as their own as it filled the air as if the Mission Inn were ringing from its own belfry.

Everyone loved the carillon immediately, and we were there at its inception.

The carillonneur took his job seriously and devised weekly concerts, like Bach at the organ on Sunday in church.

We were allowed to ascend the tower to the top, looked over the view, the city, to Mount Rubidoux which seemed jealous of the bells. But don’t climb to the top when the bells are ringing because you’ll break your ears.

That memory belongs with the series of memories of the towers of my life, the Eiffel, where Shirley and I stayed the afternoon into night as Paris spread around us, and darkness vanished in the City of Light; and Notre Dame, where I reached out to pet the gargoyles; and the Great Cathedral in Vienna where we looked down the slanting roof and saw the Ringstrasse; and the Hohensalzburg where we saw the Sound of Music City, the valley, the river; and the Space Needle in Seattle, so much like the Eiffel Tower and Paris; and the revolving restaurant atop the Bonaventure when L. A. spread out at its feet before skyscrapers stole the view; and the Palm Springs aerial tramway to the mountain top where there was tourist food and the breathless view of the endless desert.

The Carillon Tower at UCR was like that, a high point in our lives.

I know I’ll see it now, rising, as I approach the campus, telling me I’m getting closer to my past.