By Jim Hagarty
1994
When I was a kid, the nine occupants of our farmhouse regulated our daily comings and goings with the help of an electric clock which hung in the kitchen. Whether it was to church or school or job, that one clock with its cord that ran down the wall to an outlet near the floor managed to keep the clan in motion, more or less on time.
And unless my memory fails me, it was about the only reliable timepiece in the place. There might have been the odd wind-up alarm clock in a bedroom or two, but they were rarely used on a day-to-day basis because of the nuisance of winding them and were only called into service during emergency occasions such as exam time at school. I remember, as well, an old black clock radio but the clock didn’t work. And out in the yard, we owned a car or two over the years that came equipped with clocks which, almost like clockwork, quit keeping time about six months into the life of them. Otherwise, no other building or machine on the place had any device to chart the passing of time – not the barn, the driving shed or the tractors. And we didn’t wear wristwatches (or rings) because of the dangers around machinery.
So, the long(hand) and short of it is, we had one clock. And twice a year, when the time changed to Daylight Savings and back to Standard Time, somebody was given the job of climbing up on a kitchen chair and turning the hands ahead or back.
I thought of those days on Sunday as I wandered around my present property, adjusting the time ahead one hour on all of the 18 timepieces my wife and I own. As many as half of them are the screwy little light-emitting dial (LED) thingies which cannot be changed without the help of a four-page manual.
We have (deep breath here) three clocks in our kitchen on the microwave, stove and wall, two in the living room on the stereo and on top of the piano, two on clock-radios in bedrooms, one on the wall of each bathroom, one downstairs on the TV and one on the VCR, one on the laundry wall and one in each of our two cars. There is even one on the fancy electronic thermostat hooked to our furnace and the prize for the strangest is the little one that is attached by velcro to the inside of the briefcase in which I drag around all my junk. And there are, of course, two wristwatches.
An added attraction in all this time muddle is the fact that most of the timepieces keep imperfect time perfectly. So, I am forced to do quick mental calculations dozens of times daily to ascertain the correct time. One car clock, for example, is always three minutes ahead as is one clock radio. The laundry clock is consistently 10 minutes slow. The times on the microwave and stove, which sit side by side like a new tractor by a workhorse, haven’t registered the same time since the day they entered the place. The TV and VCR, inches apart, behave as though they were in different time zones.
The irony of it all, of course, is that the two people with 18 clocks at the house I now live in, somehow don’t seem to have as much time as the nine who shared one old “Westclock” on our farm 30 years ago.
Perhaps what we need is a clock on the washer, another on the dryer, one in the garage and another on the lawnmower. One in the shower would be good. Is there an eyeglass manufacturer somewhere who has figured out a way of putting discreet little timekeepers on the inside of a lens?
It’s just a guess, but maybe one of the reasons we had more time years ago was we didn’t spend very much of it worrying about devices to record it.
Or looking through clock manuals on Daylight Savings Day.
