My Grandfather's Clock
My grandfather's clock hangs on the wall just outside my bedroom door.
When I was a child, sleeping on mattresses on the floor of the narrow tall creaking house that my grandparents moved into with their clock after their long tossing post-war journey across the waters of the Atlantic, that clock hung on the wall of their living room where my sister and I slept, marking the hours until dawn with its patient tick...tock. A strange house and a strange room, and I used to lie awake in that darkness, unable to sleep. The bong of that clock as it struck the hour was a sound akin to the whistle of a train, moaning out across the darkness, both familiar and deliciously fearful.
I don't know how long it has hung on walls, speaking softly to the darkness of empty rooms. When my Oma and Opa were married in 1947, the clock was given to them as a wedding gift, from a couple to whom it had also been given as a wedding gift; and it was not new, with that first gifting, either.
It's simple enough in design, a grandfather clock in miniature, glass casing in the wooden frame to show off the deceptively simple inner workings. The face is ochre with age, the circle of wood near the catch of the clock door worn of its finish from so many latchings, and unlatchings. My father loves it, beautiful old thing, a reminder of his youth marked off with the voice of that old clock.
That clock has been with my grandparents through all their long years together, counting away the seconds, the minutes, the hours, slow and steady, marking out the time. When my grandparents left Holland for Canada, it came with them, crossing the ocean on the boat with them. When my grandparents left their first home, that tall narrow creaking place of childhood memories for their children, and their children's children, it came with them.
When they left their next home for a retirement home, it stayed behind.
While my grandparents and the aunts and uncles who still remain out east packed them down into a small retirement suite, shedding things and memories right and left, my uncle in his semi drove across the country, bringing the clock with him. He brought the clock for my father, scattering memories, and now it hangs on the wall of our house, tall and wide and open, just outside my bedroom door.
It no longer counts out time in its elderly, well-loved voice. It does not speak into the darkness of our nights, not to call out the hours, not even to tell us the passing of seconds. It has fallen silent, and I wonder again, looking at it, hanging there, home and not home, if it really is just age that has silenced that clock.
The passing of time must wear on all of us, eventually, and the stories we once told among ourselves will spiral into nothing. Perhaps, old as it is, the clock is the first of us to have learned this, of the way objects left behind will tell the tale of all those marked and measured days gone by, touching the heart of those stories, instead of the details.
Perhaps the clock still tells us these stories in silence, as it hangs on the wall just outside my bedroom, precious with memory, though it has forgotten how to speak of what it has been.
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