Ticking By

 

By G. E. Shuman

 

I like clocks. I think that’s because I have always been interested in the concept of time; of its passing, in particular, and time travel and other science-fictiony stuff. As far as clocks themselves go, antique clocks are the best. My wife’s family actually once owned an old grandfather clock with all wooden works. Wow! I guess that shows how old her relatives are.  

I also enjoy other types of clocks. I’d love to have a real coo-coo clock someday; an old one if possible. If you happen to have one that you’re dying to get rid of let me know. And I even like the new clocks that run on a small black plastic chunk of works in the back and go for at least a year on one double A battery. Amazing! And more amazing to me is the fact that many young people probably think all clocks run like that, or don’t think of any of this stuff at all. (You don’t need a clock if you ‘ve got a phone. You don’t need to know things if you’ve got Google, I guess.)

To me, clocks are cool, and evidently people know that they are a big part of our home. We received two new, interesting, beautiful wall clocks for Christmas this year… ‘last’ year at this writing. Clocks are in almost every room of our home, not really intentionally, and I don’t know how some of them got there. Okay, so I’m probably to blame.  

When it’s quiet here it reminds me of Papa Geppetto’s shop, with the various ticking and ‘tocking’ sounding of each room. I’m often reminded that each of those ticks, and all of those ‘tocks’ represent more than just the sound they make. They are literally measuring and counting down real seconds of my life and yours, and they are seconds that will never come back. And that reminds me that many things around us are measured by time. We are in a certain day, month, and season, whether you’re reading these words in my ‘now’, or months from now. We measure other things in other ways, like calorie intake, (at least in January) heights and lengths of things and the new tallness of those grandkids who were shorter seemingly moments ago.

And, according to Albert Einstein, time, and the experience of it is somehow fluid and can seem to fly by in one instance and drag on in another. To loosely quote him: “Ten minutes spent in a dentist’s chair can seem like an hour; an hour spent with a beautiful woman can seem like ten minutes.”

As I write this, I’m looking at one ticking clock on the other side of the room I’m in. I look at it, and then look away. Looking back only a few minutes later those seemingly still hands have somehow moved to those few minutes later.  What happened to the ticks and tocks in between? Life seems to be short sometimes, but someone once said that it isn’t, “It’s just that we waste most of it.”   Humm.  My nearly one hundred-year-old mother, after experiencing more moments than I ever will, would say: “That’s just the way it ‘tis.”

From my point in time, right now, we have all just entered a brand-new year, and we would do well to pay attention to it, and not waste it. 

So, my clocks keep tick-tocking away, and time keeps ticking by.  Would it help if I took out all those double A batteries?