Tick-Tock

 

Tick-Tock

Noel Laflin

8-26-21

Tick-tock, tick-tock – and so goes the cuckoo clock just to the left of where I sit to write this.

It runs a little fast, but the positioning of the wooden leaf on the pendulum is fixed in place and can’t be moved upward, or downward for that matter – as on the other cuckoo clock - so I compensate by stopping the swing once a day for five minutes in order to let time catch up.  It’s a small price to pay for a clock that could be a century old now. Heck, at a century old you would think time slows down a bit – but not in this case.

I say a century old, but am not certain of its age, to tell you the truth, as it is a recently inherited clock.

It belonged to my best friend, and before that, to his parents, and before that, to his grandparents. As my friend’s grandparents died some half century ago, I have been doing the math and that one hundred year guess is in the ballpark of time – give or take a few thousand tick-tocks.

I have been a fan of the clock for more than fifty years myself, as I could always both see, as well as hear the little bird announce either the hour or half hour in my friend’s old childhood home when I would visit.  I could also still clearly hear its announcement of time while on phone calls to my friend when it moved with him to his last place of residence two decades ago.

But due to a long illness on the part of my friend, that clock sat silent for the last year and a half.

He recently moved once more – my friend, that is - but to a place where time cannot be measured. As the clock needed a home, well, here it now is, sitting on the wall just above and to the left of me - running a little fast, and calling out to the other cuckoo downstairs on every hour and half-hour, but lulling me into memory by its gentle tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock swing with time.