Pardon me if I get emotional here today. It’s just that when a dream comes to fruition after years of struggle, it has powerful impact. You reach and reach for something for a dozen years, and when you find it in your grasp, it is utterly sublime.

I’m sorry. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.

I was finally taken on a tour of the Lewiston city bell tower. I got to gaze out over the city from high above and see sprawling neighborhoods as birds see them. I looked down upon tall buildings beneath me and felt omnipotent.

This is no small feat. I’ve been trying to get up there since I came to this burg in 1994. I believe I’ve mentioned before that city leaders and undertakers tend to duck my requests. I’m still waiting for a tour of a Pine Street funeral home and my dreams of prowling the underground caverns of the sewer system remain on hold.

They tell me there are no such caverns. I wonder what they’re hiding.

But, I got to climb the intricate stairs to the bell tower and that’s an item I can cross of my list. Stand in bell tower, check. Scuba dive in the canal, remains to be done.

The tower looks majestic and strange from the ground, but still waters run deep. Looming tall and quiet over the calamity and chaos of the city, the tower has secrets of its own.

There’s a guillotine up there, did you know that? There are wild, Frankensteinesque machines once used to summon lightning from the sky. There are three or four human skeletons and two are draped over dusty old pirate chests.

On the climb to the bell tower, I found remnants of an extraterrestrial craft that went down in Kennedy Park back in the ’50s. City officials said at the time it was just a weather balloon, but don’t you believe them. Weather balloons are not manned by tall, gray beings with giant bug eyes (I saw those too, but most of those memories have been scrubbed away).

Amelia Earhart is up there and she sends her love. Police Chief William Welch keeps his age-defiance machine up there in the dark (he’s really 108!) and there’s an impressive cache of weapons to be used in the event of an attack from Auburn.

There is a group of half a dozen hippies from the late ’60s, did I tell you that? They sit around singing Arlo Guthrie songs and talking about the situation in ‘Nam. The hippies are free to go, but they don’t want to. All is groovy in the tower above Lewiston.

There is a disco ball hanging from a high ceiling halfway up to the tower. There are boxes filled with bell-bottom pants, funk-a-delic shirts with wide collars and Nehru jackets. Every once in a while, city officials get decked out and boogie weekends away to the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack. Running a city is hard work. Doing the hustle now and then provides them a measure of relief.

There is a group of fugitive clowns living above the city offices, friends of Jim “Ginjo” Bennett. They huddle in defiant clusters, with bulbous noses and giant shoes growing dustier by the day, hiding from the circus law due to clown crimes committed in other parts of the country. They wait for amnesty and honk their horns at each other, causing perched pigeons to scatter.

A portion of the upper level was converted a decade ago into a fortified bunker in anticipation of Y2K. Back then, City Administrator Robert Mulready would stand on the steps of the city building and reassure worried citizens that all was well. Lewiston was prepared for the fear-inspiring turn of the calendar and everybody would be safe, he insisted.

But as soon as the cameras were off and the last of the reporters strolled away, Mulready hurried up the labyrinth of stairs to the bunker stocked with canned baked beans, Twinkies and Allen’s Coffee Brandy. Word was at the time, he wouldn’t even let Earhart share his space.

Yes, the bell tower has seen a lot of changes in the past 115 years. Staring through its arched windows is like staring through the eyes of the city. The secrets within are well-contained, but the secrets on the streets are visible from way up high.

I saw you, Mr. Izod Shirt, taking the parking ticket off your car and putting it on someone else’s. I saw you, Miss Dog Walker, neglecting to pick up that poop. I saw you, Mr. Editor, attempting to peel the bumper sticker off my car.

Sinners, the lot of you. You should be mindful of Lewiston’s eye in the sky as you go about your transgressions. Be mindful and sin no more.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. He wears shiny pants and does the hustle on weekends when he’s not sitting on the Group W Bench playing with the pencils.