The Grandmother Clock

We have just bought a grandmother clock, which is a smaller version of a grandfather clock and a bigger version of a granddaughter clock. If this sounds complicated, I could become even more technical by describing their various styles and sizes, including the different types of weights, pendulums, chimes and clock faces of each. In fact, after spending several weeks making the rounds of even more stores, I have learned more about grandmother clocks than I actually wanted to know.

In fact, I examined clocks in twenty-eight stores, which is quite a feat considering that I can get out only when I have a sitter, the car isn’t on the fritz and my grocery list doesn’t exceed thirty-two pages; in which case I spend the day at the supermarket basking in the delighted smiles of the proprietor, who has been known to greet me by name and offer me part of his lunch.

Anyway, I examined, pushed, pulled, listened and measured, and submitted my findings together with a scale drawing to my husband, who promptly did absolutely nothing about it. Six weeks later, he called and told me that he’d just happened to be in a department store, had seen a clock he liked, and I could expect delivery that afternoon. He also made a few other remarks about women taking too long to make up their minds, but it was hard to hear him above the noise of my head banging against the wall.

During my investigation, I had been most interested in the musical quality of the chime. After all, the main charm of the clock was its melodious tone and I wanted this quality to be exactly right, and especially not too loud.

In the noisy department store, the chimes could hardly be heard. When the clock was delivered and installed, the sound of the chimes melted melodiously into the cacophony created by the normal day’s routine. We all gathered every quarter hour like dogs in a Pavlov experiment and listened rapturously.

However, in the stillness of the night, in the silence cause by little mouths closed in sleep, doorbells and telephones stilled, dishwashers and pianos at rest, the dulcet tones of the chime assumed the volume and cadence of Big Ben installed a foot from my left ear.

I closed doors. I piled pillows and blankets on my head. I stuffed cotton into my ears. I paced floors, silently cursing my sleeping oblivious family. Hours passed, each mockingly marked by that hideous chime, in which, however musical it had seemed before, I now distinctly detected two flat notes.

It wasn’t just the chime that disturbed me. It was the inexorability of it that forced me to lie awake in anxious apprehension. I finally stopped it entirely and stumbled bleary-eyed to bed for the rest of the night.

My husband used to reminisce fondly about the chimes of his childhood clock, and his desire to create similar musical memories for our children. Now, it’s all very well for children to be reminded of the passing of time. To them, time is a luxurious infinity, a never-never land which has no direct application to them. But at my advanced stage of life, I don’t want to be reminded every fifteen minutes of how little I have accomplished in the past quarter hour and how few and fragile my plans are for the next.

I’m convinced that a chiming clock would make an excellent substitute for one of Dante’s more infernal tortures. The words written on the face of my clock are oh, so sadly true! Tempus indeed fugits, and I must admit that I resent it, bitterly.