When I was a kid, we had three clocks in the house.
An alarm clock sat on the nightstand next to Mom and Dad’s bed, of course, though I don’t think I ever heard it ring. Dad set it every night to ensure that he wouldn’t oversleep and be late for work at the Thompson Wire steel mill, but he always awoke in the dark and turned it off before it jangled the house awake.
My brother and I also had a clock radio on the nightstand between our beds, but I don’t think we ever set that alarm, either. Its primary use was to tell us when it was 10 p.m., which was when Dick Biondi would play the top three requests on his WLS radio show, and when he was finished doing that at 10:30, it was time for lights and radios to be turned off. In the morning, Mom was our alarm for school.
And then there was the kitchen clock—black hands on a white face, surrounded by a bright yellow frame that made it look like a sunny-side-up egg in reverse. It was there above the Fridge to tell us how much longer we could linger over breakfast before we had to dash off to school.
But we ignored the kitchen clock, because we always leaped from the breakfast table when we heard the first school bell ring, which meant that we had exactly five minutes left before the second bell to dash through the Kufliks’ yard to school on the next block, no more than a hundred yards or so away from our kitchen table.
It was just one of countless ways that the world helped us keep time and made clocks meaningless:
We rubbed the sleep from our eyes and hopped from bed on summer mornings as soon as the neighborhood dogs barked their greetings to each other and told us that no adults would object if we scrambled out to join the clamor.
Our softball games would never start a new inning once you stood on home plate and could no longer see the evening sun, which had dipped below the roof of the garage in the alley.
And we had to be home, of course, before the street lights came on, a rule that spawned the identical lame late excuse in every house—“But how can I know that the street lights are going to come on, until they come on?”
We had one calendar in the house hanging on the pantry door to mark the passing of the year, but we rarely looked at it, either, because the world’s calendar told us everything we needed to know:
The first bloom of lilacs in May meant that the white bass would be running in the rivers, and it was time to brush the cobwebs from the fishing poles stacked in the garage.
The shrill of cicadas in August meant that school would be starting up in a few weeks, and it was time to start all those forgotten summer projects—like building a treehouse—you promised you would do when you were sprung from school back in June.
The first measurable snowfall meant that winter was here, and it was time for Mom to bake date-and-nut bread to celebrate the occasion.
Our three clocks and one calendar were there if we needed them, but for the most part, if you needed to know where the time was going, all you had to do was pay attention to whatever tale the world was telling.
But that was then, and this is now. Today our house is filled with digital clocks and calendars, and I’ll bet yours is, too.
Right now, as I write these words, numbers showing the time and date stare at me from the lower right corner of my laptop.
The hours and minutes also blink on our oven, microwave, coffee maker, cable boxes, TV screens, alarm clocks, and cell phones.
And just in case those blinking numbers weren’t enough, we also have a small array of standard clocks scattered through the house, like the gold French-style nightstand clock they gave me when I had logged 25 years on the same job.
Or the little black clock on the shelf in the living room that we picked up at an antique shop.
And, of course, the grandfather clock in the den, which calls me to pull chains and weights at least once a week to keep it on the job.
I don’t know why we would need to add any of those clocks to the army of blinking, flashing, digital timekeepers that keep watch all throughout the house, except that those extras are all analog clocks, with hands that loop in circles around a face framed with numbers. They are there, I think, to remind us that time is all about circles—the daily spin of the earth, the monthly arc of the moon, the yearly orbit of our planet around the sun.
That army of digital clocks tries to tell a different tale. They suggest that time is linear, and that the minutes, hours, days and years line up in a neat row to tramp toward the future—a future we may one day reach, as long as we keep marching in time.
But the digital clocks and the calendars lie. Because time is not a straight path leading to the future, which is unreachable.
No, time is all about circles:
The circles we run in to try to keep pace in a frenetic world filled with clocks reminding us that time is passing.
The loop of memory that brings us back to an era when we had time to listen to the world’s slow, stately swirl around us.
