The Silent Clock

They say even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and my mother's grandfather clock has been right twice a day for the past six months. I can't remember exactly when my dad bought it for Mom; probably for Christmas, and I'd hazard a guess to say it was the Christmas of 1955, while I was in the Navy. It's a thing of beauty, manufactured by the Hanson Clock Manufacturing Company of Rockford, Illinois, my home town.

Bought when my folks lived at 2012 Hutchins Avenue, it subsequently moved to my mom's family home at 1720 School Street, where it remained until, after Dad's death, Mom moved it with her to be near me in Los Angeles. It graced her living room for less than a year before she herself died, and I brought it to my own home on Troost in North Hollywood, and from there to my house on Kurt Street in Lakeview Terrace, and from there to my two homes in Pence, Wisconsin, and to three (count 'em, three) successive apartments in Chicago.

And each time I moved it, I would have to remove the pendulum and then could never get it back on right and would have to call in a clock man. When I brought it to the first of my Chicago apartments, I had the clock man remove the works, take them to his shop, and renovate it. In the move a key piece at the top of the pendulum was broken off, and the clock man soldered on a jury-rigged replacement. When I moved from that apartment to the one across the hall I for some reason did not restart it immediately, which was probably a good thing, since I was forced to move (one of the joys of living in city-owned housing) yet again.

So last week, fairly confident I may be here for awhile, I called a clock man to come get it to work. I did not even try to put the pendulum back on myself, partly because of my inability to move my head far enough in any direction to be of any good.

I assumed I was calling the same man I'd had do the work the last time, but I was mistaken. The first man had a set house-call fee of, I think, $175 per hour or so. This new clock man advised me, upon arrival, that his house-call fee was $350 per hour. Upon attempting to replace the pendulum he noted that the once broken piece was broken again. He then, on inspection, advised me that the clock was in need of more than $1,000 in repairs. (It is a very old clock, after all, and the old saw "they don't make 'em the way they used to" truly applies. The repair would be very time and labor intensive.)

I told him I simply wasn't prepared at the moment to expend that kind of money--feeling terribly guilty even as I said it. He agreed to put the pendulum back on even with the broken part to see if it might work. It did, but he advised me that it could stop at any time.

So I am on borrowed time, as it were. And while it may sound odd to say, I find a continuity in its ticking now just as it has ticked the countless hours of countless days of more than fifty years. There is comfort in hearing it softly chime every fifteen minutes, the sound cushioned by and echoing all the years that have gone before.

And when it does stop again, I will find the money for the repairs. There is no way I could not. And even though it would, even stopped, be right twice a day, I vastly prefer to hear it talk to me every second, gently reminding me of family and friends now gone who once heard the same ticking, the same soft chiming. It's yet another bridge between now and then, and between them and me.

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