The Clock

When my husband Bruce and I got married, his parents gave us a clock with a stained-glass face and a silently swinging pendulum. The clock face is covered with iridescent white flowers. It’s pretty, and it did its job reliably for more than thirty years. But last October, over a period of days, the clock began to act peculiarly. As a writer, I see in the things that happen day-to-day an opportunity for discovering hidden meaning. I couldn’t help but think, What’s up with the clock? And I couldn’t help but wonder—could its odd behavior be a sign? I started trying to figure it out.

Now, my mother once mentioned to me, in that offhand way mothers have, that I was the most sensitive of her children. She added that, when I was an infant, if the lightest breeze blew across my face, I’d sputter and bat at it. I can’t speak to my siblings’ levels of sensitivity, but it’s true that I have always had acute emotional and physical reactions to the things that happen around me. Fortunately, I’m mostly able to hide it and carry on like anyone else.

Consider the picture at the top of this post. That’s me, with my mother’s youngest brother, Otto. Something happening outside the frame of the picture has me clutching my Easter bunny and pondering the universe with uncertainty and maybe worry. I have a wild imagination and strong intuitions. What’s up with the clock? I kept asking myself as the strangeness unfolded. I couldn’t help but think that something was about to happen.

The story of the clock is a story of midnight.

Here’s a picture of the clock as I found it, the morning I discovered its strange behavior. You can see the clock face is mounted to a wooden case with a mirror behind it. The bird figurine at the top is something meaningful to me that Bruce attached to it later.

For my family, nature’s critters are our neighbors. My parents loved hummingbirds and used to feed them. A hummer would hover outside the picture window above the coffee-nook table whenever the feeder was empty. Seeing it there, Mom would prepare sugar water, and Dad would go out and fill the feeder, all the while talking to the flock zipping around his head, and referring to himself as Grandpa. When Dad passed, Mom took over the whole feeding routine, and now my sister owns the place, and she’s the one. When I found the hummingbird-and-flower art piece at a little shop back home, I was struck by how much it echoed the flowers on our clock, and I bought it and brought it home.

You’ll notice that the clock reads seven seconds before midnight. Now, that wasn’t the actual time when I took the picture. I had gotten up early with our dog, as I always do. It was still dark, being October. The clock sits on top of the kitchen cabinets, right over our stove, and as I was prepping the coffee pot, I glanced up and realized it had stopped while we were asleep.

Hmmm, I thought, we need to change the batteries. The hands had halted at almost perfect midnight—how unlikely was that?

Oddly, it made me think of the “witching hour,” thought by some to commence at midnight, a time of increased supernatural activity. It also brought to mind the children’s nursery rhyme: “Hickory dickory dock. The mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one, the mouse ran down. Hickory dickory dock.” Musical as it is, there’s something a bit ominous about that little song. Strangely, although the hands on our clock had stopped, the pendulum was still doing its back-and-forth thing. I snapped a few pictures. The pendulum is situated differently in each one.

Later, when Bruce got up, he changed the batteries, and the clock began to work again. The hands moved smoothly past a noon hour, past midnight, past noon again. When I went to bed that evening, all was well in the chronological world.

The next morning, when the dog and I came back in from the yard, I glanced at the clock. It had stopped. At seven seconds to midnight—maybe a hair off. The pendulum was still swinging. Here is the picture I took that morning.

This was feeling very strange. Stopping twice wasn’t weird—but at exactly the same moment? Perhaps it was simply symptomatic of the clock’s age, its innards warping and giving out. But why had it passed twelve several times with no trouble? Bruce tried to get it going again, but there was no resurrecting it. He replaced the whole time-keeping mechanism, and that was that.

Well, that was that in the physical sense, but, again, I’m a writer. The clock’s stopping just before midnight might signify some beginning or end. I wondered—will it be a bad one, or good?

Then I remembered a dream I had, years before.

It was night. I was alone, away from human habitation on a dark, lightly wooded hillside. Suddenly, the sky opened along the horizon, and light expanded upward from it in a brilliant fan. I heard singing everywhere, on earth and in the sky, and I knew it was the last day—this world was at its end. The mind asleep is so revealing. Anyone who has grown up in this culture might think I was terrified, expecting judgment. I was anything but! My heart leaped in my chest with happiness. The Creator of it all was starting something new, and I would be living in it and seeing loved ones who had passed from this world. I woke up suddenly, startled, and still happy.

Yes, it was a dream. For reasons that I’ve written about on my blog, I expect to see my loved ones again—but we are still living in this world, with all its transient joys and all its woes. We are still the flawed creatures we are, failing to care for ourselves, let alone one another.

Getting back to my contemplation of the time on our stopped clock—seven seconds to midnight—I started thinking about my age. Seventy, this year. My creaking joints, the way my lower spine sometimes makes threatening clunks when I move, has had me fretting about my age for quite some time.

I was the one in our house who kept discovering the stopped clock. So I wondered if the message I perceived was meant for me. Was the clock’s strange behavior a warning that I have “seven seconds” left to live? If I thought there is no life after this one, that this is the only dimension, it would be bad. But my impending end motivates me. What I do with my time from here out matters more than it ever has.

I started thinking about clocks—other clocks that track some concerning  current problems. The Doomsday Clock, for one, which nuclear scientists adjust over time to call attention to how far away we are from technology-induced catastrophe. Most of us of an advanced age can remember having to hide beneath our desks in school, as if a desk could shield anyone from a nuclear blast. There are a lot more nuclear weapons in the world now than there were back then.

Initially, the setting of the Doomsday Clock was based on the dangers of nuclear technology, but it now also considers climate change and the rise of AI—artificial intelligence. My personal assessment is that, the way things are, the climate will take humankind out slowly. AI will have the capacity to do it in one fell swoop. The Doomsday Clock is now set at 90 seconds to midnight. Am I grasping at straws to think it’s better than seven seconds?

I thought, too, of the more recently created Climate Clock in New York City, which measures the amount of warming the earth is experiencing and how long we have to change the way we live and do business before we trigger catastrophic change. The news these days covers an endless stream of worsening heat, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. I know there’s reason not to blindly trust the mainstream news. But the climatic changes where I live are obvious without reading a word or watching a second of TV. Are we humans the cause? I think it better to assume so, than to categorically say no.

On July 22nd of this year, the Climate Clock will tick down to fewer than five years left. Sounds better than seven seconds, but considering the long history of the earth, not much. I spend scattered moments each day, here and there, talking out loud, a kind of prayer. My prayer for humanity is that we will take what’s happening to the climate seriously. But looking again at the hummingbird at the top of our clock, we humans are not in this world alone.

Last week, in the “tidbits from the archives” that our local newspaper prints, there was a story from July 5, 1984, about a duck in a small pond in town—long before I lived here. It had gotten twisted up in the plastic web that had held a six-pack of beverage cans. The story noted that the sheriff’s office was going to try, again, to catch and free it. My mother, if she were alive and seated beside me as I was reading that little story, would have been nodding in recognition at my reaction. I was so flooded with sadness, thinking about the duck and what that innocuous piece of human technology had done to it, I almost succumbed to what would have been a fruitless search to find out what had happened to it.

Bruce and I live at the margin of a little wilderness. There’s a sassy chipmunk who seems to have claimed our house as his own. He’s often crouched outside our front door, behind the safe curtain of our entryway bushes, looking out onto the yard. When we open the door, he scoots into the nearby downspout. The chipmunk drives Bruce crazy, because when the garage door is up or cracked a bit for ventilation, the little bugger will come in and unceremoniously poop in Bruce’s tool drawer. I love that chipmunk. Poop or no poop, every time I see him, I have a surge of joy.

This is my prayer for the chipmunk—that the clock will favor him. That his children and their children, and so on, will be living in a healthy world and pooping in people’s tool drawers for eons to come.

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