Tick Tock
My husband has a fondness for clocks. When I owned an antique store in Winter Park many moons ago, he kept a constant flow of antique and unusual clocks in the shop. They were found at auctions or through private contact and we kept between 20-30 on a front shelf behind the front counter. Mostly they didn’t work when he bought them for their beauty. He would tinker for a while himself and hand them over to a clock repair guy when he couldn’t figure it out. When we moved to Mount Dora and closed the shop, we ended up with a few that were spread around our new home. I remember the melodious sounds, or cacophony, depending on how you feel about multiple clocks dinging and donging at once. Eventually they stopped working and now serve as beautiful reminders of a lost art, while our phones give us the exact time without much effort.
About the time of our last anniversary, he came home with a three weight Grand Sonnerie Strike Vienna regulator wall clock from 1890, crafted by a German clockmaker named Gustav Becker. The casework is a beautifully carved mahogany and the brass pendulum moves gently The chime sequence is one for the quarter hour, two for the half hour, three for quarter and four for the hour, each of which is followed by the actual time chimes in a lower register. So for quarter to seven, it chimes in one tone three times, then in a lower tone six times. The first tones are melodious. The hour tones carry a reverberation so they sound something like boi oi oi ng.
Here is the problem: The chimes grab my attention throughout the day and often at night. I now know the meaning of fifteen minutes, and they are speeding up. This beautiful clock is a reminder of how quickly my time on this earth is passing, which may be causing anxiety. Or adding to it, because I’m already feeling existential anxiety from the speed of change of…well, everything in my everyday life.
Last week Jay and I returned from a glorious three weeks in Europe, two of which were spent on a near perfect ocean cruise called the Trade Routes of the Middle Ages. We traveled from Bergen, Norway down to Barcelona. The ship docked in Amsterdam, Belgium, Paris, two ports in England, one in Portugal and three in Spain. We were catered to in every way and I had nothing to do but relax and enjoy. No dogs, no dirty laundry (our laundry was done for us) no cleaning, no cooking, no financial decisions, no minutia to get bogged down with. Our excursions were curated and we only had to follow along. Nothing to do but spend every minute enjoying ourselves. As long as we kept track of when the next excursion started, we paid no attention to time. We ate when hungry, we slept when tired.
I savored every moment on that cruise, not only in an attempt to remember everything, but also to slow down the passage of time. To saturate myself so that I could take To saturate myself so that I could take those images and feelings home with me. This was the perfect time to be in the present. To participate fully without dwelling on the past and wondering (worrying) about the future. A true vacation as defined by its root word of vacatio, from the Anglo-French reference “exemption from service, respite from work” and traces back to vacare “to be empty, free”. Both meanings applied. I felt the boundaries of responsibility drift away as we stared out at the gentle waves of the ocean.
Time had little meaning; only the essence of the moment seemed important. But all wonderful things come to an end, or they would lose much of their loveliness—it’s the contrast that is delicious.
Back to the lovely clock. Since our return I am now hyper aware of each quarter hour flitting by. It’s enough to kick in that damn anxiety, especially on the days when I can’t seem to get stuff done. Honestly, fifteen minutes can feel like… well, just minutes. I’ve deliberated asking Jay to adjust the clock, but need to answer a question to myself first: do I want to be oblivious to time passing or can I accept that it is passing and that I should do the best I can with each minute. Does the time reminder spur me on and keep me from collapsing into retirement lassitude?
What do you think?
In the meantime, I’m looking at options for the next cruise.
