Time for Valentine's Day

There is a clock here in our house, an antique Seth Thomas. It hangs in our dining room. I love winding it, so does my wife. First, I wind the counterweight that controls the gong, and then I wind the counterweight that keeps the time. All the while my eye on the weights, watching them rise into the shadows at the top of the clock. There is just something about the antiquity of this act and this clock to me.



At least once a day, I will stand in front of the clock and simply watch the brass pendulum swing to-and-fro. Each “to” marking one second, each “fro” marking one second, audible ticks at the apogees. Those ticks settle into the background breathing of our home, mostly unnoticed until they stop.



The sound of the clock’s gong is made by a small hammer striking a coil of iron. In the clock’s long life, this coil has become bent and distorted resulting in the sound of the gong being damaged and blunted. Somehow the survival of this sound in its fractured state brings me comfort and the feeling that the clock has lived its long life that was both easy and hard in unknown measure. I think I can relate.



My favorite time of day with the clock is when both hands are joined at twelve. It is a moment that lasts precisely twelve seconds. The longest this arthritic gong will sound at the top of an hour. It almost never fails to give me pause twice a day. I will go silent, I will listen, and I will hold my breath as I keep count listening to each word and hoping for understanding. I am thankful for those moments and realize to keep them I must share my attention with the clock once each twenty-four hour period, this is about the longest our clock will go without our touch.

And maybe that is it, maybe the magic in the clock for me is in the symbiotic nature of our relationship to it. We keep its heart going and it whispers and sings to us thanks in its cracked voice. I really liked my wrist watch, but when the battery died, I simply put it away in a drawer. It didn’t really need me and I didn't really need it.  If I need to know the time, I have my phone, my computer, my tablet, my oven, my clock radio, and even my microwave. I am surrounded by impersonal time. These electrified and battery-operated descendants of our wall clock don’t need us much. They don’t ask for attention unless a battery dies, or the electricity fails. Their call for help could take weeks, months, or years. Otherwise they could not care less. But our clock relies on us as we rely on it, every day. It is a ritual. If I want to know not the time but the hour, I must listen for our clock. And in that instant of the gong I step from outside time and into it.



Today is Valentine’s Day, and the clock by its presence and not its talents reminds me of that. It keeps me present in the understanding that love is not all passion. It is more ritual and care and understanding. It is being with someone who enjoys being around you at least as much as you enjoy being around them in good times and in bad. My wife is and always will be that person to me. Later today, my wife and I will go to a movie then out to eat. We will hold hands as often as possible and share those soft quick kisses that I cannot resist sharing whenever, wherever I am near her. At home, the clock will continue to keep time in ticks and gongs, breathing steadily because we wound it, eased because we rubbed oil into its elderly wood, clear because we clean its glass. It will wait for us to come home, and we will smile when we do as the ticking hits us and then settles into the house. We will look at it, making sure we have remembered to wind it, then we will retire into each other for the rest of our evening.



Happy Valentine’s Day

Gothic Cathedrals

There are few things more powerful than being raised both Southern and Catholic. It amounts to a boyhood steeped in intimacy and ritual. It results in a lifetime of Gothic views and spirits.



Not everyone is Catholic. So it may be difficult to see how being Catholic reinforces being Southern and vice versa. From baptism, Catholicism is a road of ritual, a path through shadows ending in the light. Baptism is not the simple daubing of blessed oil in the symbol of the cross on a child’s forehead, or the pouring of water through the infant’s fine hair. The source of water must be flowing, it cannot be still. One does not simply receive communion, they must go through appropriate training and instruction by both laity and the ordained. They must have made their first confession to God through a priest. They must take to heart and soul the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the holiest of flesh and blood. Life is marked and recorded by these moments of sacrament. Each sacrament cataloged on your baptismal certificate held at the church of your baptism, held where you were born in Christ. We are fed the mysteries of the saints of our Church throughout the millennia. St. Francis of Assisi, his life a roadmap to sainthood and forever naming him as patron saint of animals and the environment. St. Erasmus is the patron saint of sailors simply because he was martyred by having his entrails wound upon a capstan. St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. Lost causes, is there anything better to have a patron saint of, anything more gothic, anything more truly Southern.



Being raised Southern was not as well documented as being raised Catholic. But being born in the South there is an immediate link to the land, to the earth by an inseverable umbilical cord. Life blood no longer coming from your mother, but from the red clay beneath your feet. It is a link that is spiritual, but not pagan. It is the sense that there is no smell like that of pine sap and the rotted leaves of a forest floor, or of salt and death in the scent of the pluff mud that fills the coastal marshes. It is seeing winter not as domineering, but as flirtatious with the springtime as her skirts flare out in flaunting enticing unequal wisps of hot and cold. It is embracing the humidity which embraces us, telling us that we are both loved and possessed. Instead of saints, we have our ghosts. Lost family, neighbors, even the occasional stranger that is still tied to us rather than making the step into what is next. Beyond these ephemeral qualities, there are rituals to be learned, to be passed down from father to son and mother to daughter.



I was raised to be a gentleman. To open doors for girls, to yes ma’am and no ma’am no matter what age I was speaking to. I was raised to tend my own garden of a soul alone and in quiet no matter how rocky the soil or how blistered and blooded my hands got. To be a man is to bear up, to take the load and carry it unblinking. Girls are raised to be fierce and to be the foundation of the family and the keeper of our dead. They are raised to smile sadly and with complete empathy as they pierce you unnoticed. The presence of blood (actual or metaphorical) the first and most lasting impression that the argument is lost, and you have just been killed with kindness.



My life has been and will always be entangled in the mysteries of my land and my faith. There are shadows in both but no place to hide. Whether it is the red of the clay or the red of Christ’s blood, whether it is the humid kiss of summer or the oily smearing of ashes on my forehead, my life will always be guided by the symbols of my birth and baptism. My life will always lie on this beautiful and flawed foundation because I know nothing else. Bless m’heart.