My family clock

Winding the clock was my Dad’s Sunday morning ritual, done while still in his pajamas. He’d already brought in the paper, had a smoke, and plugged in the Farberware coffee pot.  It’s an eight-day mantel clock that strikes the hours and dings the half hours.  Eight inches wide by twelve inches high. Decades of dust and polish have darkened its mahogany housing. 

My Dad opened its glass door by its brass rim or bezel and reached for the double end key that lay on the top of the clock.  He inserted the larger end of the key first into the shaft on the right side of the face, just under the number 4.  This wound the hours. Then he moved the key over and inserted it into the shaft on the left, under the number 8, winding the hour strike and the half hour chime. Gently, but deliberately. Not too tight---that could be fatal.  You never want to wind a clock too tight, everyone said. 

Then my Dad padded over to the black telephone in the far corner of the dining room and dialed “Time.” “At the sound of the tone, the time will be  . . . .  and thirty seconds.”  He returned and nudged the hour and minute hands into place.  The smaller end of the key could be used in a tiny pinhole in the center of the clock face---to adjust if the clock ran too fast or too slow.  That would be determined later in the week. 

He snapped the glass door shut and then gently tilted the clock to the left, setting the pendulum in motion. The tick always began. Then, just as deliberately, he returned to his chair---the sections of the paper rustled slightly and slid a bit under his slippers.  He lit a second cigarette.   Ready for another week.  

The clock is a centenarian. Manufactured by Seth Thomas who, come to find out, was a promoter of  mass production for clocks in the nineteenth century.  Clock factories were big in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Kept the industrial North running on time. 

The clock is in my house now.  My Dad’s handwriting in pencil on the back of the clock reads:  “Windsor So 10072.” Maybe a model number? No idea. The brass bezel around its glass door is tarnished. But the black Arabic numbers are still graceful against the yellowed, creamy enamel surface of its face.  I checked on eBay and found a dead-ringer going for $125. Its shiny rosewood housing surely refinished. In Flint, Gunther Gerholz found me an additional key.  I felt prepared for the future, but then Gunther’s shop closed.  We are on our own now. 

Nothing in my parents’ house was new or “store bought.” Most objects had a point of origin that provided a name. Enhanced the object in a child’s imagination.  My family called this mantel clock “the Coughlan clock.” The back story was that it had been a wedding gift to my father’s uncle, Timothy Michael Coughlan, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the U.S. Cavalry.  Around 1900 Timothy Michael married Helen Gardner.  Someone gifted the couple with this mantel clock, evidently an appropriate gift for a new household. Kept domestic life orderly. 

Colonel Coughlan served in the Great War.  Afterward, the Army established regional Corps Areas across the country to facilitate future national mobilizations. Colonel Coughlan belonged to the Artillery Group, 9th Corps Area, headquartered at the Presidio of San Francisco. Perhaps he had ambitions; he wrote a pamphlet entitled, “Mobilization in Retrospect,” bound in simulated leather and printed at his own expense in 1926. His family, now with four daughters, lived near the Presidio in the Richmond district in a three-story house on 16^th Avenue. Someone snapped my first baby picture on its stoop. Leaning over me is Aunt Helen, in a long-sleeved black dress, a strand of pearls dangling, the marcelled waves of her short gray hair to the camera. 

The clock must have been in the living room of that house, though I don’t recall it there.  Every year, my two cousins and I spent family Christmas celebrations roaming its upstairs floors. I remember a Prussian spiked helmet and a saber that tumbled out of a closet.  A panoramic photograph of a mounted cavalry regiment stretched across a bedroom wall.  A sewing room lined with windows that was still used. Bibelots from China, supposedly shipped home in a camphor chest after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. 

We kids ate our Christmas dinner in the breakfast room off the kitchen.  An aproned Black maid specially hired for the holiday served us turkey and grits. The grown-ups milled around the dining room; tap, swoosh, thwack went the swinging pantry doors as parents, aunts, and uncles refilled endless cocktails.  One year the turkey hit the kitchen floor, my mother said later. 

When Aunt Helen died, the last of the family belongings---long since jumbled into an apartment---were parceled out. In the 1960s suburbs with wall to wall carpeting and pastel refrigerators, who wanted an old clock you had to wind?  My Dad claimed it. He placed it on the left side of the fireplace mantel in our living room.

I carried the clock back to Michigan on a plane, swaddled in towels, in a canvas bag resting on my lap. Now it stands on the left side of my fireplace mantel.  In the beginning, I was afraid of the clock, of the dreaded “winding it too tight.”  But I’ve learned the feel of the tension, when the turns of the key have stored just enough energy to carry the mechanism through the week.  I’ve grown into the task, it seems, inherited a satisfying Sunday ritual, a weekly recollection---timely, you might say, since all the religious ones have lost their hold and fallen away.  

The strike may startle if you’ve not lived with a clock that has a mechanical movement. Overnight guests are forewarned. In this century’s electronic soundscape, its clear tone is distinctive.   In bed, I often hear the clock striking---first two, then three am; the chime floats across the darkness, separating the sections of the night, assigning each hour its number. I’m hearing the same sound heard by my dead but once sleepless parents and a generation before them as well.  If it’s Saturday night and the strikes seem slow, well, tomorrow will be time for the morning ritual.  

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