Friday thing : old clock

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” ~ Marthe Troly-Curtin

I don’t know when I became obsessed with clocks specifically but I’ve always been acutely aware of time passing. I remember the excitement of having my birthday in August blending into the thrill of starting a new school year, followed quickly by anticipation for Christmas. The journey from January to June was a blur of mildly anxious days looking forward to summer vacation, when I would finally become Cool. [Spoiler: Nope]

Around kindergarten, I got a Minnie Mouse watch, which I erroneously & irreversibly put on my left wrist because that’s what everyone in my right-handed family did. But despite it hindering my writing comfort, I loved knowing at a glance what time it was. For many years I was not without a wristwatch - I had nearly a dozen different styles, found at garage sales or cheap mall stores or from my mom & grandma’s jewelry boxes. I even nabbed my grandpa’s clunky old Timex to wear when I was briefly cool¹ at community college in 1988.

There is something paradoxical about trying to be aware of time passing. The act of being mindful requires admitting that each moment is fleeting, over & disappeared as soon as we try to grasp it, like a snowflake. Or a gnat. I pared down my watch collection a few years ago, but still like having clocks in every room. I even had nine in my English classroom - six were set to different time zones so we could imagine what people were doing in places like Chicago, Tokyo, and London while we were discussing Shakespeare or Shirley Jackson. I think this is at the heart of my preoccupation: We are all experiencing time, its movement and effects and implications. And by “we” I mean everyone now, everywhere, but also those who lived before us and even people who will come after us. The existence of time - even (especially?) knowing it’s an arbitrary concept - is what inspires the possibility of time travel, which in turn makes us contemplate how we might better, or at least differently, use our time. What would we have done in Nazi Germany? How might we have spent our days in 1964 Mississippi? If I could go back to Wednesday night, would I still choose to play Word Wipe for two hours instead of preparing this post for today?
Basically, clocks remind me to physically pay attention to the [arbitrary] minutes ticking. Literally, I can hear the seconds passing and assess what I’m doing. I’ve learned to give myself grace - sometimes I’m doing nothing of ‘real’ consequence or importance (Word Wipe) but know some frivolity is a necessary part of life; we don’t need to always Be Productive². My clocks keep me grounded, even if they aren’t actually set anymore, like my old Baby Ben DeLuxe.

When I was teaching in Portland, I drove down east Burnside every morning, passing by an antique store that always had piles of stuff sitting outside. My genetic disposition to stop at all garage sale-like events was at odds with my need to be at work on time but one afternoon, I finally stopped on my way home. The place, every corner and shelf packed, reminded me of my grandpa’s wrecking yard. Throughout our childhood, my cousins & I would either crawl around the old cars looking for bounty on our own - coins, toys, comic books - or dig through the boxes of junk he had already extracted. It felt like a treasure hunt but without the danger of pirates or stress of deciphering a map. Inside that store on Burnside, I employed my old skill of scanning the items for what I could actually use, for what really wanted me to find it. This old clock stood out. Its face was cracked, the base & casing jagged and pitted. But when I wound it, the ticking was loud and hardy. The alarm worked, alarmingly so in the close, dusty shop. I loved it, but $20 felt like a lot for a trinket when we’d just moved into a new house and were about to have our first child. I went home to think about it.

The next day I stopped in again, worried that somehow someone else had already bought my clock but it was still there. Waiting and ready for me.

One of the nine clocks in my old classroom - perpetually unwound and set to four of two, in honor of They Might Be Giants (the kid-friendly version)

1. Borderline, lower case ‘c’

2. Though I do often score in the Weekly Top Ten for AARP players and think I ought to have some sort of trophy for that