I heard a speaker remark one day that “In Africa the belief is that the Americans have the watches, but Africans have the time”. For sure! I received my first watch when I was in the first grade. It had Mickey Mouse on its face and his hands pointed to the numbers and it made it fun to learn to tell time. Since then, I have owned dozens of watches from really cheap and utilitarian ones to beautifully built expensive ones.
I have to admit that I have at least one clock in every room of my house. Any time I look up, I can see what time it is, either on my wrist or in the room. Some of these are incidental clocks like on the microwave or the oven, the computers, or our phones. I do not consider these to be real clocks, just smart-alecky electronic devices that like to let us know what time they think it is.
My wife and I have three very serious clocks in our house that are special to us. One is the corner grandfather that I bought for her birthday in 1983 chosen for the way the chime sounded in the store. I’m sure the salesman became tired of hearing them all and was happy when I found the one that was perfect. It has stood stately in our living room, keeping perfect time for 41 years. It keeps good time because it has its own maintenance guy that comes by once every ten years for its once every decade cleaning and maintenance.
I have my mother’s mantel clock that she received from AT&T upon her retirement from a lifetime of work with the phone company. The clock stopped a couple of years ago, but The Clock Shop in Brookside brought it back to health recently for a few more years. It is now happily ticking and chiming on time.
The third is our anniversary clock. An anniversary clock is a delicate clock with a glass dome designed to be wound once a year. It is sometimes called a 400-day clock because it is said to run for 400 days without winding. I bought it for us to enjoy about 25 years ago and is one of the last true mechanical anniversary clocks. The current ones are quartz clocks and are much more accurate, easier to maintain, and not very interesting. I wanted a true mechanical anniversary clock and have been waging a kind of battle with it since its purchase. It has seldom run accurately if at all, and has been sitting on a shelf, only looking pretty, for years.
My wife suggested that having this non-working item to dust was no longer a good experience. I could tell by her tone of voice that she was thinking about finding it a new home. I said that I wanted to see it running and keeping time; this has become my challenge for 2024.
The Clock Shop said that they don’t work on these clocks because they are too finnicky. I watched YouTube videos and read articles about setting up and calibrating them, spending some quality time with my old friend. I now have it running; dialing in accuracy is an ongoing process. It is on the shelf next to my mother’s very accurate mantel clock for companionship and I am happy to report that I am getting close. I will not be deterred by the videos warning that accuracy was never the strong suite of these types of clocks, and I refuse to be defeated by it. I think I still have a little bit of time to experience victory!
Video version