The Soft Ticking Sound of Life...

For some reason, I thought of my Grandpa White tonight. I’m really not sure why. He died 25 years ago of a heart attack. Family lore says the clock on the fireplace mantel stopped at the exact minute he died. Maybe it did. He slumped in the chair, his dead weight dropped to the floor, and the clock hands clasped in grief…

He was obsessed with clocks of all kinds—wristwatches, pocket watches, grandfather clocks, grandmother clocks. He would take them apart. He would put them back together. One of the outstanding memories of my childhood was going to my grandparents’ house and hearing all of the tickings and chimes. They would all gong on the hour. Some were slow. Some were fast. Clocks all have their particular way of keeping time.

I am one of those people who can tell time without looking. Maybe you are, too. I can tell you how much time has past, how much time something will take—usually down to within a few minutes. Maybe I inherited this from him. I always like to have a watch with me. I feel naked without a wristwatch. I wish, at times, that I could "lose track of time." I have never been able to.

Grandpa White was a charismatic man, especially at Christmas. For most of my childhood, he was synonymous with Christmas—almost as if he was Christmas. He made such a big production out of it. He would sing songs, play the records, and tell us tales of Father Christmas and his adventures.

Grandpa White had a radio announcer’s voice. It was deep, articulate. I learned once that he had been a stutterer as a child. Maybe this is why he annunciated things so well and talked with a methodical sing-song. It was the kind of voice that immediately drew you to whatever it was he would say.

He loved to tell stories in that soft New England accent of his—somewhere between Bawston and New Yawk. There was a music to the way he spoke, like he understood the subtleties of inflection.

Whenever he and Grandma would go on vacation, he would leave us elaborate notes about “visiting the tribes of the North to powpow,” etc. Half of the thrill of taking in the mail when they were gone was reading what he notes he had left for us to find.

My grandmother does not wind all of the clocks like he did. Going for a visit is much quieter now that he is gone. He was a complicated man. I will not explain all of my reasons for saying this. Suffice to say, he still looms large over the family. He was a larger-than-life persona.

Time is a strange thing—the way it traps us and catches—as if being caught in a web. We are prisoners to it. What would life be like if our existence was not measured by minutes and hours? How would we be different? There must be something liberating in only being bound by the sunlight and nothing else. Dawn, day, dusk, twilight…there aren’t even words to describe it; everything is quantified. Good? Bad? I don’t know. I should be sleeping now. It is the “middle of the night.” Yet, my body’s rhythms prefer to be awake.

When I die, will there be a clock on the mantel to seize up and stop to mark my passing? Doubtful. But, what a romantic notion! Like one of Samuel Coleridge’s feverish opium dreams...

Tick, tock, tick, tock…like bars, and so it goes, a construction, a necessity, an impossible prison to escape…and taking apart a watch and putting it back together does not make me any less bound by each slice of the pendulum…