A Flow of Time & Love

At last, the pendulum clock is running and keeping good time. I pass it many times a day on the stairway landing as I travel back and forth between kitchen and bedroom. The ticking is faint but steady. It whispers of love.

My sister Jan and I grew up in households that were stormy, sad, and—after our mother died—cruel. Happily, every summer we flew away from California to Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The break from our difficulties made a huge difference, especially for me, younger and able to spend more summers in refuge than Jan did.

The schedule was always the same: a month with our maternal grandparents (Grandma and Grandpa) in rural Indiana, two weeks with our paternal grandmother in Detroit, six weeks at summer camp, and a few days with our aunt and uncle’s family in Toledo. Each of these experiences nourished me, but the months in Indiana were most important. They were lengthy times of feeling safe and loved, setting me up for health of soul and mind. Though soulful mental health was beyond reach until late in life, I found it eventually, and my months on the farm help explain why.

I enjoy memories of puttering around the land and running errands with Grandpa. Morning, noon, and evening we’d sit down for meals Grandma prepared… like clockwork. We’d eat beneath the swinging pendulum of the big old wall clock, its ticking barely audible, like a muffled heartbeat.

Grandpa was kind and playful—crucial correctives for the unfriendly, serious business of my upbringing: my parents’ marital storms prior to their divorce when I was three; my mother’s battle with depression that ended in suicide when I was six; my stepmother’s fury about my arrival in her home, expressed in calculated brutality; my sister’s scary psychosis when I was eleven; and so on. Every summer I recovered somewhat as Grandpa witnessed, mentored, and loved me.

After dinners at summer camp we sang songs, which was fun until the repertoire came to "My Grandfather’s Clock." It ended with these words: “But it stopped short / Never to go again / When the old man died.” As a needy, scared, and sad child, I felt devastated by the thought of my grandfather gone. Having lost my mother not many years before, the possibility of grief felt real and visceral.

Those haunting lyrics popped into consciousness when the clock arrived. It looked delicate and brittle, the wood dry and the cabinet split in one corner. I wasn’t sure it would run. Perhaps it would hang on the wall, still and silent, a mute witness of loss.

Nearly two months passed before the clock worked properly. But now it runs well, and the grief in the song has—at last—transformed. That dismal ending is rewritten, and Grandpa has returned to life, a little, here and now.

I believe the clock meant a lot to him. As I understand the story, it hung in the apothecary his pharmacist uncle ran. Spending time in that shop fed dreams of a career in medicine. His family’s poverty meant formal education wasn’t possible, but decades later those dreams found a generational echo. I told Grandpa my plans for medical school shortly before he died, and—according to Grandma—hearing me cheered him during the discouragement he felt near the end of his life. Knowing it made him happy helped me overcome fears about the burdens of clinical work.

The clock connects me with Grandpa, but it also connects me with my aunt, another important person in my life. As she entered her nineties, she urged me several times to choose something from her house to receive after her death. I felt a yearning for the clock—which had been hanging near her kitchen table for decades—but wasn’t comfortable asking for it. My reluctance is a story of its own, but it doesn’t need telling here. Besides, her repeated urgings helped me overcome it. I told her the clock would mean a lot to me.

My aunt lived in Virginia, where she and my uncle had moved in retirement. Just as in Indiana, the slow swing of the pendulum soothed me when I visited and ate beneath it. I made occasional trips to Virginia over the years, but they grew more frequent after my uncle’s death in 2010. I received the news of his passing while in nearby Washington, D.C., where I was starting an acupuncture training consisting of six modules over two years. After the end of that first module, I drove the few hours to my aunt’s farm to be with her and the family.

I continued to return after each of the modules, for long visits during her early years of grieving. We went on walks and drives, spoke of my uncle, and deepened our relationship. With the pattern established, trips from California to Virginia continued after the training ended, and they soon included Mandy, my wife. Always, the clock presided over our meals, just as it had presided over meals with my grandparents in Indiana.

After my aunt’s passing in 2024, my cousin Scott shipped the clock to me. It arrived in a box the size of a small refrigerator, wrapped in a protective cocoon of bubble wrap, foam blocks, styrofoam peanuts, layers of cardboard, and yards of packing tape. After the UPS driver left it on our porch, my wife and I lifted the box into our living room and opened it carefully. Packing material flooded the floor as the clock appeared. 

It took me a week or more to choose and install mounting hardware for the stairwell wall. Then came the scary task of suspending the ancient, rickety heirloom. Once it was mounted, I struggled to get it running properly. At first, it would tick for five minutes. I fiddled with its position and it ticked a bit longer: 15 minutes, then 30, then an hour or two. Finally, it worked for days, then weeks. Fully wound, the clock can sustain itself for a month.

So it was running, but it kept poor time, losing ten or more minutes per day. I knew the mechanics of pendulums from introductory physics classes. Clearly, the bob needed raising, but I hesitated to fuss with the delicate mechanism. After Scott wrote that adjusting his own pendulum clock was straightforward, I made the attempt. But the moment I tried to raise it, the heavy brass disk and suspending rod dropped, landing loudly inside the clock’s cabinet. I had destroyed my grandfather’s clock!

Or so I thought. Trying to still my panic, I removed the little pins and screws that secured the clock hands and the 18-inch face, with its large Roman numerals. I looked inside. A compact brass gearbox obscured my view of the pendulum support mechanism, so I used a hand mirror to examine the simple system for supporting the swinging arm and connecting it to the gears. The narrow slat of wood that held the pendulum was designed to hang from a quarter-inch ribbon of steel. A thin, flexible armature emerged from below the gearbox to pass through a narrow slit near the upper end of the wooden slat. Two tiny holes near the top of the pendulum arm aligned with holes in the steel ribbon. A fine wire must have secured the wood to the steel, but it had come loose. Rehanging the pendulum required nothing fancier than a new wire.

Getting the pendulum rehung was a step forward, but now the clock stalled often, as before. Several days of nudging the mount this way and that brought things into alignment and restored steady function. At last, I was back where I’d started, with the clock running but losing time. Now I was ready to adjust the pendulum, turning the small knurled disk beneath the bob, raising it to speed the timing. And after another week of fussing, it keeps good time!

I’m struck by how the clock is both simple and robust. The heavy pendulum hangs from a setup that seems flimsy, yet it worked for more than a hundred years and—once broken—was easy to repair. It’s the opposite of modern devices, which are complicated and often unfixable.

I became curious about who made this noble timepiece, using principles that seem archaic to us now. Through online searching, I found a photo of an identical clock. The Atkins Clock Company manufactured its “Wall Regulator” model for twenty years before going out of business in 1879. I find it amazing that something built that long ago, lightly and simply, still works. Few household items purchased in my lifetime have a chance of lasting so long.

Grappling with the pendulum clock reminds me of how clocks have always intrigued me. During medical school, I kept numerous timepieces in my studio apartment—on tables, shelves, and walls. These weren’t antiques; they were plastic, cheap, and charmless. Yet they felt important, even if visitors thought them weird.

Perhaps my grandfather’s clock had something to do with my obsession. Maybe I was yearning for its heart-like ticking. Physics classes also played a role, introducing me to both pendulum mechanics and the strange truths of relativity. Plus, as a biologist, I’m deeply aware of how life is steeped in time. It feels natural to be curious about the passage of seconds, days, eons. 

Nowadays, contemplating time is a core part of my spiritual practice. Sitting in meditation connects me with its flow in a palpable way. Feeling the movements of breath is foundational to mindfulness, and it happens moment by moment. Trying to stay present for breathing reveals the mind’s hunger to fantasize about future plans and relive past events. Yet as the mind settles with practice, I grow connections to a different type of time. Not a remembered past or imagined future, but a deep rootedness in human and evolutionary history, with tendrils reaching toward an unstoppable, unknowable future. In the vast soil of already-passed and yet-to-come, mindfulness plants me in the wire-thin instant that is now… now… and now.

The grandfather clock spurs similar meditations. As a clock, it reveals the passage of time. As a swinging pendulum, it connects time to earth and movement. As an heirloom, it revives departed loved ones and the simpler days of a century and more ago. As a heartbeat, it pulses steadily but precariously, as it has my entire life, bringing to mind my own fragility and resilience.

This morning, looking inside the clock’s cabinet, I noticed my grandparents’ initials carved in angular letters, barely visible in the dark wood. Like time and life, love endures.