The Well-Oiled Mantel Clock

This clock that I speak of has exhibited several alarming symptoms which is why I took it to the clock shop.

Anybody would! It’s what you do when your mantel clock is broken, you take it to the clock shop.

These symptoms, in no particular order, run as follows:

• It will repeatedly and randomly fail to chime when it is supposed to. Everybody knows that clocks are supposed to chime on the hour and on the quarter hour. Everybody knows this except this clock. It may be that it has always dreamed of becoming a mime and challenges itself to get its point across without actually making any sounds.

• It will chime the wrong time whenever it wants to, that is to say it chimes on the hour but the wrong hour, or on the quarter hour but the wrong quarter hour. I have seen this with my own eyes, standing in front of the thing with a digital watch linked to the Universal Standard Time in Greenwich. Simply because it has chimed four o’clock in no way means that it is four o’clock. It could be any of the other eleven hours of the day or night, and simply because it has chimed the first, second, or third quarter, this has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not that is the actual quarter hour.

• It will, alternately, chime at random, at times selected for reasons known only to it. It may chime at 22 minutes past the hour, five until the hour, or – and I don’t think I have ever seen a recorded instance of this in any of my research, and by this I mean this has never occurred before in human history – it will chime in between minutes, that is to say at 12-1/2 before the hour, or three minutes and twenty seconds after the quarter hour.

• It will on occasion chime every chime that it has in its inventory – hour, quarter hour, a grab bag of seemingly random, perhaps Martian, chimings, and each of the 12 chimes that we are all used to – in series, that is to say in a frantic sprint of chimes until it is entirely spent. I once sat in a car at the side of the road in the early 70s when something very similar happened: the car, then safely coasted to the side of the road and put into neutral, went into some kind of spectacular overdrive fit more suitable to a rocket ship or a fireworks display than a car, which drove the engine to rpm’s it was never built to handle, and which only stopped when the gas tank was empty.

I think any reasonable person would agree that I have ample cause – more than ample cause – to take this device into the clock shop.

The party at fault in this relationship is not me. I want to make that perfectly clear. Not me.

It is as though the clock has been to see some modernist French play and is now all wrapped up in an approach to life that celebrates randomness and finds a certain kind of bleak freedom in chatting right out loud about the meaninglessness of existence. Or not chatting as the case is here.

Or perhaps it is a case of a rebellious spirit, one that has grown weary of the expectations society has laid upon it and now seeks to shrug them off.

Welcome to the club, is all I can say! Don’t we all wish such a thing!

I explained all this to the gal behind the counter at the clock shop, including this bit about this personality change and the French plays and the car I was driving in the 1970s.

“It is like,” I tell her, “when your friends went away to college while you stayed in your hometown and when you saw them next at Thanksgiving, all the cleancut football player types had hair down to their shoulders and were sporting moustaches of the Fu Manchu variety, which you had never seen before. It is exactly like that!”

I finish with a flourish, glad to have hit upon an example that so clearly stated the situation.

The problem is that this person was thirty or so years away from being born at this period that I speak of, so the analogy may not quite hit home.

In fact she is looking at me in the manner of a person watching someone’s mouth to see if the other person has finished talking yet, since that is all she has to go on.

“Well, let’s just see what we’ve got here,” she says in a soothing voice. “It’s almost 11:00.”

And indeed it is. There must be fifty clocks upon the wall in this store and they each, as does mine, point to a few seconds before the eleven o’clock hour.

I step back in a dignified fashion and clasp my hands behind my back, a distinguished gentleman of a certain age who has learned a thing or two in life and is willing to let the situation speak for itself. I silently gesture and invite her to observe.

All the clocks as one begin to whir and click and then, nearly simultaneously to the second, start to chime the hour of eleven o’clock in a range of wondrous tones.

Including mine.

It gives no indication of having been shamed into doing what it was supposed to do for a living all along, nor of trying to keep up with its colleagues.

No, it just chimes away eleven times in a respectful and businesslike manner.

The situation reminds me of another situation I was once in when I had an attack of laryngitis, and through a torturous series of emails and phone calls made on my behalf by kind people – remember, I couldn’t talk! Couldn’t speak at all! – I finally arrived at the doctor’s office, and once called down the hallway to the examination room, and asked what my problem was, I told the nurse that I could not speak, not a word, not for the life of me, it’s the funniest thing, I just couldn’t make a sound.

That nurse looked at me and seemed to have her own ideas of what was wrong with me.

“You’re talking now.” She says this in a flat tone of voice, which I would not say gave a good example of a bedside manner. “You are talking now, perfectly clearly. I can hear your every word.”

“You don’t understand,” I say, as patiently as I possibly can. “I cannot speak at all. Do you understand?” I say as though to a child slow on the uptake. “I have entirely lost my voice.” I sound the words out for her as you might to a person just learning the language. “I…can….not…speak…I….have….lost…my…voice.”

I am really beginning to wonder where these docs get their nurses these days when the truth of the situation falls upon me, like a beam from the ceiling above.

That same feeling, allowing for differing circumstances and different set of players, is again upon me, as the clock strikes the eleventh and final chime.

The woman looks up at me, not in an unkind manner, but more in the way of polite bafflement, such as ‘how do I get out of this conversation?’

“Gee,” she says,“that sounded like eleven chimes to me.”

I stare at the clock balefully. Putting me in this situation!

She says, “here, let’s move the hands to the next quarter hour and see what we see.”

She does so and it dutifully rings the quarter hour.

She moves the hands again.

It rings out manfully at the half hour.

She moves the hands again.

Again, the pearl-like tones of a clock in perfect working order…chiming.

And the next quarter hour.

And so on.

I’m getting that French modernist play feeling myself, maybe hell really is a clock chiming mechanically until the universe runs down completely.

A thought strikes me. My thinking is subtle on this matter so I want to make sure I get my point across.

“Do you think it is drunk?”

“Drunk?” she says, pointedly looking at her wristwatch for quite a length of time. What a thing to do! She has all these clocks on the wall and she makes a point of looking at her wristwatch and then looking at me! Imagine that!

“Yes, you see, it is not a drinking household, but here in the Christmas season we always have a bottle of holiday schnapps in full view, just part of the festivities.”

I hold back my best point and then spring it upon her right now.

“And do you know where we keep it?” I motion to the fiendish device and drop my voice to a whisper. “Right next to the clock!”

I pause to let the thought unspool. “It seems completely within reason that this clock has been inhaling fumes from that bottle every time it is opened! I don’t know how else to explain this personality change!”

I leave soon after, ushered to the door.

On the way home I have strapped the clock, this rebellious clock, there really is no other word, in the front seat using the seat belt.

The mood is quiet, but this is only because a storm is building.

“This is on you,” I finally say. “We could have gotten this fixed if you had only cooperated, but no.” My voice is icy cold. “No. That is not your way.”

We have pulled up to a red light and the man to my left is looking at me strangely.

What a funny situation, it finally occurs to me.

I roll down my window and motion for him to do the same. It takes him a while but he finally does.

“You must be wondering what I am doing! I know this looks funny,” I say, laughing lightheartedly, “seeing me here seemingly talking to myself, but that’s only because I’m talking to my clock. I’m not just talking to myself! How silly would that be? You can’t see it, you see, my clock I mean. It’s too low in the seat. No worries, I’m just talking to my mantel clock.”

I drop my voice to a stage whisper and hold up my hand and talk behind it as people do when they don’t want another party to hear. It’s a bit theatrical but it gets the point across.

“You see,” I confide to my new friend. “I think he’s developed a drinking problem. When I tell you that he can longer chime the hours or quarter hours correctly, then you get a feel for how far along he is. Sad, as much as anything,” I say in a musing manner.

At that point the digital clock on the dash rolls over to three o’clock and the clock, my clock, the one in the passenger seat, booms out the familiar four part chime, followed by three hearty rings as though the village bellmeister had picked up an iron mallet and whacked the ancient bell in the church steeple with precision and power.

You’d think he was trying out for one of the male leads in West Side Story!

The man rolls his window up and looks straight ahead until the light changes and then he is off the starting line as though we were at Le Mans.

The clock and I don’t speak all the way home.