Clock

in mem. Stephen Arkin (1942-2021)  

A local craftsman wrought the body of my great grandfather’s clock in a village in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. The artisan was likely well known to my ancestor, the town where he created it small even now, but downright tiny a hundred and thirty years ago.

I suspect that a person different from the one who shaped its body rendered the moon on the clock’s face, which grins from crater to crater. And did a third party assemble the internal mechanisms? I haven’t any idea. The plaque on the cabinet door reads, Made in Emmaus, 1874, but the clockmaker’s name and the names of conceivable colleagues had vanished into the brass even before my father’s time.

I know I should have seen to the restoration of this old treasure’s inner workings, but I’m somehow content with the motionless, vertical pendulum.

As I approach my 80th birthday, I can dwell on memento mori. Time’s erasure of the artisan’s name may be the link, no matter how oblique, to what I conjured this morning as I dusted the close-grained walnut of the clock’s frame and the blond poplar of its cabinet. I suddenly thought of rock n roll pioneer Fats Domino.

When Fats died five years ago, my friend Stephen telephoned. We’d been close as brothers for over half a century, and had always cherished the bluesy music that crossed into mainstream radio in our teen years.

Stephen was severely ill, but upbeat, as always. He and I reminisced, each thanking our stars that Fats, Little Richard, Bo Diddley and others rescued us then from Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson, Georgia Gibbs, and other luminaries of conventional 50s radio.

I still hear Fats’s inflections as I play the first 45 record I ever owned: We happy in my blue heav-awn.”

I also hear my poor whiskey-sick mother’s protest as I spin the tune one morning before school: “My God, what is that?”

Well, what it wasn’t, to her dismay and my delight, was her generation’s Tin Pan Alley version, all lilies, lights, and bouncy strings. May that agonized woman’s soul be at rest; she did as well as anyone could while tyrannized by lethal addiction.

As for me, I’m drinking in the sunshine through our kitchen window. Sunny February days in upper New England are to me the most beautiful of the year, putting the hysterical foliage of Vermont’s October to shame.  The sky isn’t ever as blue as now, or the clouds as hard-edged and bright. The hillside trees are winter-bare, but they’re as honed as a finish carpenter’s wood. At night, the full moon lays down an ineffable light.

I know it’s spring that I should be thinking of. Like most of the world’s citizens, my wife, our five children and seven grandchildren have endured the COVID pandemic; as I write, Russian forces are battering Ukraine; political ugliness abounds worldwide. We all need rebirth and new life, and spring’s a clichéd metonym for that.

My friend Steve died of his cancer not long after the conversation I remember so well.

Late February marks winter’s eleventh hour– which, strangely stubborn, I prevent our stately old clock from striking.