Wag On The Wall

This clock came home from a local flea market about 25 years ago. I vaguely recall it cost $20. The clock was manufactured by St. Aubin, a now defunct company in Switzerland, and was made c.1940. Its ticking and chimes have marked my children’s lives ever since. 

For those unfamiliar, this is a mechanical clock. The power comes from the heavy weights that drop by gravity, powering the clock’s movements. The swinging pendulum regulates the timekeeping, and every hour the clock will strike the count of the hour, as well as ding once on every half hour. It is an “8-day clock”, meaning if you let it go for more than 8 days, the weights hit the floor and the entire thing grinds to a halt. The raised brass numbers and rings are embedded into the wood, creating the clock face, and the movements are enclosed in a wood case behind the face, but the pendulum and weights are exposed. This is considered a “wag on the wall” style clock. The term comes from the similarity of the pendulum swinging back and forth to a dog wagging its tale. While the pendulum is original, the long metal weights are new, as about 5 years ago the original ones gave up the ghost.

Speaking of ghosts, this clock most certainly has to be treated by a “clock doctor” to keep up its stamina. Much like a family dog, it needs attention periodically, and every few years has an expensive medical crisis. This clock tends to run slow, but recently it simply stopped running altogether. The pendulum would not keep swinging, and thus it stayed silent. I put up with random issues for a long while, before I finally give up and haul it to my local clock doctor as I was concerned it was in the final stages of demise.

The clock doc, who is Russian, diagnosed significant back problems. The glue holding the casing together along a mitered seam had caused the wood to warp. This resulted in the box going catawampus, putting pressure on the pendulum mechanism where it attaches to the clock gears. Thus the pendulum ground to a halt. The last visit required significant surgery, clamps included. Doc indicated he added pins and new glue and feels it should hold up for another 50 years or so.

But like any dog, my clock demands pampering. Each week the weights need to be lifted back to the top, resetting the pendulum swinging. Sometimes the pendulum does not stay in motion, and requires an annoying readjustment of the hour hands. Other times the chime begins to sound like a thunk, not its typical resonant ding, requiring me to dust it. In addition, it is known to tack on an extra hourly strike. When you’re lying awake at 3:00 am, the sound of the clock ringing gets your attention. Then begins the ring count. Hit or miss if it is accurate, either because I can’t count at 3am, or because the clock likes to mess with me. I tend to think the latter as periodically during the day I will stop to count the rings, and often they are right back where they should be. Kind of like a puppy who innocently looks at you though you know it’s up to no good.

To keep the time accurate, the pendulum needs to be raised or lowered, and for the life of me I can never recall if twisting the nut to raise the round base increases the speed or decreases it. I’ve been known to fiddle around with it, and eventually give up – hauling it yet again for another stay at the Russian Clock Hospital. (Just so you know, that is a jest – the clock shop has a name, but I think of it as a clock hospital, complete with procedural charges not covered by insurance). And, in case you are overly concerned, the Oracle says: “Turning the nut to the right speeds up the clock, and turning it to the left slows it down (in other words move the nut up to speed up, or down to slow down)”. This makes sense from a physics point of view, as the lowering of the nut makes the round weight sit lower on the stem, creating a wider arc which would take more time to swing back and forth. Thus time would slow.

Wonderful idea: time would slow. It seems only yesterday our eldest child came home from the hospital, but in fact it was 33 years ago tomorrow. I read a line in a novel yesterday, and to paraphrase: somehow 33 years have conspired to get past us and leave us looking back, amazed to find so many years stacked behind us (The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, Mark Lawrence). The ticking of a clock tells us time has a set speed at which it will run. Yet life doesn’t seem to work that way. Somehow, as you age, you realize time speeds up. The ability to capture a moment – to stop time and appreciate this second right now – is a bittersweet joy of getting older. The chaotic demands of parenthood, the stress of getting everything done, the endless to-do lists, so like a clock as it ticks: to-do, to-do, to-do. In the end, all those things mean very little, and it is the memories of each moment we hope to hold on to. In some ways it is easier in our modern age with cameras always in our pockets. But it is also harder – if all you do is take a photo, have you really experienced that moment? Capturing memories in writing can preserve them for future generations in a way photos cannot. Having dug through generations of my ancestors’ pictures recently, the reality is those pictures meant very little to me. When a note was found which described the image, it created a more poignant connection. And helped identify the mysterious individuals from the mid 1800s.

The ticking clock lets us know that moment is over, gone into history. And each moment stacks up on another, spinning the hands of the clock ever forward. Take a moment to pause, to recognize that NOW is a gift, a moment that you can stop and savior. It will not come again – but if you are lucky, all those pendulum swings will produce a life you are proud of. And we are very proud of our son.