Clocks

When I was a kid I had two clocks. One I got for my 9th birthday, it was a gold colored wind-up alarm clock; I had seen it on some tv show and asked for one for my birthday. My dad made a big schpeel and rhyme about it when he gave it to me before school. I loved it and had a very particular routine about keeping it wound up. The second was a bird clock; one of my great aunts sent it to me after she thought I asked her for it. Every hour, on the hour, a bird would call. There were 12 different birds, but I can only remember and recognize the sound of the mourning sparrow, its sadness and deep call at 7am and 7pm always reassured me.

At night I would lay in my bed and tune into the clocks. My gold clock moved in eighth notes: 1+2+3+4+; my bird clock, just quarter notes: 1 2 3 4 . Both clocks were at 60 beats per second, but they weren’t in sync themselves so the air was filled with ticking. The ticking seemed to take on musical textures and I would happily lay in bed under layers of them.

Happily I would compose beautiful symphonies and songs to the ticking. It kept me away from the boredom and more often times scariness that was my sleeping and dreaming. As an anxious kid who had more nightmares than pleasant dreams, I would try to position my brain so that when I did finally fall asleep I would simply continue the pleasant musical I had been directing in my mind. It didn’t work, but I always tried.

It wasn’t until probably last year that I learned other kids didn’t do this; they didn’t write music in their head to out of sync clocks’ ticking. Perhaps they did something else to not feel so alone and so anxious. Perhaps they had relaxation exercises to wind them down for bed, or maybe they just weren’t anxious.

Those clocks and their music were my haven. They distracted me from that figure in the corner that was probably a demon watching and waiting to possess me. They salved the wounds of the day from when that kid was mean to me. They stimulated my brain in a way that school, though I loved it, hadn’t found a way to do just yet. They helped me concretely know that whatever I do in life I want to be surrounded by music and to make art.