My husband and I are loaded up and rolling out of my ancestral home in Vernon, Alabama. We turn northward from my father’s rust-colored long gravel driveway and head to New Jersey. Stretched out in the rear of our SUV is the grandmother clock my father made some 50 odd years ago. He constructed the six-foot beauty of native Philippine Mahogany and carefully transported it from our island-jungle home, crated in a box he also made at the Subic Bay woodshop. It was a gift for my Uncle John on his medical school graduation, who lovingly cared for it fifty years until retiring and selling his house to RV full-time. I jumped at his offer to give her a new home. The classic Westminster chimes dinged in the background of our family gatherings, and I often admired the statuesque lady, pausing when she rang out a few simple notes to mark the passing of each quarter hour.
Now, on her back she protests transportation farther north with tiny tinkles. I smile and turn to Dan, “I guess we’ll hear her singing for the next 16 hours.” At our first rest stop Dan engineers a solution with an old bath towel and we allow James Taylor to replace the clock’s music. “The secret of life is enjoying the passing of time,” JT tells me in his uncomplicated way.
Those fifteen-minute intervals Grandmother Clock segmented for me used to seem long enough to accomplish any childhood duty. Back then to wait an hour was horrendous. I always yearned for Christmas or summer break, and neither came quickly enough. Not so now! I’m unable to wrap my brain around what professor Einstein meant with that whole relativity of time concept, but when my 90-year-old friend, Don Halket explained, “Time is like a rollercoaster and the nearer you are to the end the faster you’re going,” I got that. My simple-minded understanding is that as my timeline gets longer, those fifteen-minute intervals keep getting relatively shorter.
I hang with the over-eighty crowd a lot lately. I grin when Ernest Borden at ninety-two tells me if he’d known he was going to live this long, he would’ve taken better care of himself. I think about Grace Foster, who at her hundredth birthday party whispered the secret of life in my ear; “I don’t eat no junk food.” At 106, my friend Clarence asks me how old my father is now. When I tell him he’ll be 88 next birthday, Clarence replies, “Whoa, he’s really getting up there.” I wonder how long fifteen minutes feels to them. What other secrets should I ask them to reveal? Would they agree with JT on “enjoying the passing of time?”
In the weeks after we get back to NJ, Grandmother Clock surveys her new home from the dining room corner. We clean her, balance her, tweak her pendulum length. She gives us a good week of those classic notes derived from Handel’s Messiah, but by Sunday, she’s five minutes fast. I just can’t ignore that; I just can’t leave her alone. She needs to be right on time. Unfortunately, my time-tweaking results in her going on strike and refusing to tick or tock longer than five minutes. Dan tells me to leave her be until he has time to do it right.
That would be the problem. I haven’t learned the secret of life. I must practice enjoying the passing of time. I must stop tweaking it, and let Grandmother Clock be relatively on time. For now, I anxiously await that “right time.”
Try This: Close your eyes and try to feel the passing of thirty seconds. (Don’t count!) Open them and check how close you were with a timer.
Comentários