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