The Flow of Time & Love

At last, the pendulum clock is running and keeping good time. I pass it on the stairway landing several times a day. Its ticking is faint but steady, like 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 from California to Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The break from our difficulties made a huge difference.

Though Jan graduated out of it after a few years, the schedule was fixed: 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.

For me, 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, and dangerous business of my upbringing in LA. Every summer I recovered somewhat as Grandpa witnessed, mentored, and loved me.

At summer camp, we sang together after every dinner. Singing was fun until the repertoire came to "My Grandfather’s Clock", which 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. 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 transformed. That sad ending is rewritten, as if Grandpa has returned to life, a little, in the quiet home of my later years.

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 amidst the discouragement he felt near the end of his life. Knowing it made him happy helped me overcome fears about a clinical career.

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. Her repeated urgings helped me overcome my reluctance. 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 as a young adult. Visits grew more frequent after my uncle’s death in 2010, which happened while I was in nearby Washington, D.C., starting an acupuncture training. When I heard the news, I drove the few hours to my aunt’s farm to be with her and the family.

The training continued for two years, with visits to the D.C. area every few months. On each trip, I drove to my aunt's home for long visits during her early stages 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 over meals with my grandparents in Indiana.

After my aunt’s passing in 2024, my cousin Scott shipped the clock to me, after working hard to protect it from the hazards of cross country travel. It arrived in a box the size and shape of a coffin—which seemed a little ominous at first, in my anxiety about taking charge of this family heirloom. Those fears gradually faded after Mandy and I lifted the box into our living room and opened it. Inside the large box the clock was wrapped in a protective cocoon of bubble wrap, foam blocks, styrofoam peanuts, layers of cardboard, and yards of packing tape. Packing material surged across the floor as the clock emerged, unscathed.

Still, I felt pessimistic. I doubted my ability to mount the clock and get it running. I feared it would hang dead on the wall, a mute decoration, a confirmation of that camp song's ending. 

It took me a week to choose and install mounting hardware for the stairwell wall. Then came the scary task of suspending the ancient, fragile heirloom. Once it was mounted, I struggled to get it running. At first, I was happy when it stayed ticking for a few minutes. As I fiddled with its position and alignment, it ticked a bit longer. Runs of 15 minutes, then 30, then an hour or two became more common. I read online and tried blasting the mechanism with air, jiggling the clock arms, tapping the cabinet a little left, then a little right. Gradually, the running time increased further. It rand 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. 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 alter the pendulum, its 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 system that supported the swinging arm and connected it to the gears. I saw a quarter-inch ribbon of steel, from which the pendulum had swung before falling. It's wooden arm had a slit cut into the narrow upper end.  Two tiny holes appeared designte to align with matching 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. All that was needed after that was to reinsert the armature that exited the gearbox into a narrow channel in the pendulum arm.

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 tirelessly throughout my grandfather's life and my own. Then when it broke, it was easy to repair. The clock's design seems the opposite of modern devices, which are much more complicated yet often unfixable.

I became curious about the makers of this noble timepiece. A bit of online searching led me to 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 consumer 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 movement of breath through time foundational to mindfulness. Trying to stay present with breathing—in this very moment—reveals the skittishness of the human mind, as it jumps forward to future plans or backward into memory. Yet as the mind settles with practice, time is no longer imagined as past and future. Instead, it is experienced as a steady center in a changing world. In the vast soil of already-passed and yet-to-come, mindfulness plants me in the ribbon-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 long 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.