The Clock

For years the same GE radio alarm clock sat on my parents’ bedside table, on my mother’s side, specifically. My parents had gotten it as a wedding gift in 1981 - woodgrain top and sides, unremarkable in appearance with garish fluorescent red numerals noting the time. Every morning it would dutifully, shrilly announce 5:00 AM until one day my mother figured out how to set it so the radio would come on instead, a little crackly since we didn’t have great reception in the valley where we lived. It played old country songs and commercials for local car dealerships with a smoker’s hack that annoyed my father. Everybody smoked then. I don’t know why my parents chose to keep it on my mother’s side, since it was my father who arose first to start the coffee pot and get ready for work, leaving before any of us had gotten out of our warm beds. Maybe he was a heavy sleeper, and it was my mother who had to wake him up each day, a chain reaction from one side of the bed to the other. These were details I’d never know.

When my father left, the clock stayed on the bedside table, but stopped being useful at 5:00 AM. Without my mother’s hand sweeping across the top to turn it off each morning, it gathered a thick layer of dust, serving to make it look more antiquated than it was already. The time display still worked but it wasn’t accurate - a power outage at some point had reset it to a blinking 12:00 nobody had thought to change. The dial hadn’t moved in years but we wouldn’t know that station had long since been bought out, had ceased playing twangy country hits and instead played modern pop for nobody. The radio era was long gone. Nobody felt one way or the other about that.

As I cleaned my mother’s things out of the house, room by room, I purposefully avoided her bedroom, leaving it for last. The sting and finality of her being gone, of the house being sold, of it having been years since we had all lived here as a family seemed to be housed that single room, a thick, humid fog that wouldn’t lift. I didn’t want to face it. Finally, when the rest of the rooms were bare and swept, nothing but a few boxes left by the door to load into my truck, I steeled myself for the inevitable. Turning the doorknob to her room, I noticed the familiar squeak it gave for the first time in years. Metal on metal.

The same mildewy smell had permeated the entire house since it had stood empty for the summer months, but it seemed stronger in there, probably from the door being closed, the bedroom sealed from the airflow through the rest of the place. I cracked the windows open with a heave, though not much relief would be found with the still-warm early September air sitting stagnant outside. Looking around the room, I surveyed my mother’s belongings left to pack, left to throw away. As I calculated what would likely be another two hours of work after an already back-breaking day, a small movement caught my eye. “12:00,” the clock said over and over and over. “12:00, 12:00, 12:00.” I walked over and sitting on the bed, took the clock in my hands. The coating of dust came off under my fingers, gathering in little dustbunnies I’d have to vacuum off of the carpet when I was done packing. I thought about that clock, sitting there forgotten for so many years, dogged, still demanding to be seen if not heard. It had lived a life. It had served a purpose. My knees cracked as I leaned down to yank the plug out of the wall. The display went dark, relieved.