from a Katrina prompt

The first clock I remember was a toy. Most of mine were hand-me-downs, but this wooden clock was my very own, purchased new in 1963. The Fisher-Price “Tick Tock Teaching Clock” was wooden, with a dial on the back to crank for music, and a clock face on the front. Best of all, it had a yellow plastic handle so I could carry it anywhere.

The music box played “Grandfather’s Clock.” This is an old song written in 1876 by Henry Clay Work. There are popular enough versions by Burl Ives and Johnny Cash, but my version was timed to the tick-tock of an old clock. I sang along words I knew from somewhere, not caring how macabre they were.

Ninety years without slumbering

tick tock tick tock

his life seconds numbering

tick tock tick tock

It stopped. Short.

Never to go again

when the old man died

I belted it out, oblivious to both time and death. While the music played, a round panel with a window rotated on the clock face, showing children enjoying their daily activities as the hours ticked off toward eventual adulthood, old age, death.

I’d like to think I learned how to tell time with this old clock, but I’m sure I didn’t. My early play was mostly solitary. My older siblings were busy being older than me. My father was working, and my mom was busy with the demands of three kids, running a household, and giving piano lessons in our front hallway.

So I sat, pointlessly spinning the hands around, cranking that handle, watching children move through a day in that little window: riding a bike, being read to by a granny, shopping with mother, taking a bath, being serenaded in bed by a rooster, and then heading to school, little lamb in tow.

I don’t think those activities made any sense at all to me. My grandmother read to me, but I certainly never took a lamb to school. I couldn’t ride a bike. The sequence bore no resemblance to my own days, but I loved this toy. Tick tock, tick tock.

I played with it for hours on end.

*

We had ways to communicate the time to each other in my youth. We said “after” and “’til.” For the first half of the hours, it was “Five after,” “Quarter after,” “Twenty after.” For the second half of the hour, you said, “’til,” short for “until,” as in “Quarter ‘til.” The half hour was “Half-past,” as in, “It’s half-past.” You never said the hour, because everyone always had a basic idea of what the hour was. I lived in farm country, where people would look at the actual SKY to estimate the time. When I looked at a watch, I only looked at the minute hand.

When I was a teen, I heard other ways to call time. “Ten past (the hour)” and “Quarter of (the hour).”

*

My first watch was my mother’s. It’s a dress watch with a black cord band from the 1950s, and has her original name engraved on the back. This was a gift from a sailor named Red who wanted to marry my mother when she was fifteen. I wore this watch every single day until I turned 21. For that birthday, my parents gave me a little Seiko, a tank style that was very in that year. I loved that watch and wore it every single day until my then-husband gave me a different tank watch for our tenth anniversary.

This was a fancier watch, but our marriage started to fall apart soon after that. It went into a drawer to be ignored when he left, after a short stint in his possession after I gathered the jewelry he’d given me, put it in a paper bag with a couple of champagne bottles he’d saved from celebratory events—buying the house, the aforementioned tenth anniversary—and repeatedly hit the bag with a hammer.

There was also a note.

*

That year, once I regained my sanity, I bought myself two large men’s Timex watches with flexible bands, one silvertone, one goldtone. These are the first and only watches I have ever bought for myself. They still work, though they live in a drawer, now, with a big Rolex-looking Timex. My ex-husband bought me another watch many years after the divorce, a fancy lady’s watch with faux diamonds marking the hours. He was sorry, I didn’t care, I exchanged it for manly watch with a black leather strap as an act of, well, “Nice try, bub, but you really don’t know me anymore and maybe you never did.”

The last watch in the drawer is a dainty gold watch set with diamonds and rubies given to my grandmother by my grandfather for one or another anniversary. It doesn’t work. My grandmother pressed it on me when I was fifteen. It doesn’t work, but it’s pretty.

*

I don’t wear a watch anymore. Like everyone else, I check my phone or the corner of my computer monitor when I need to know what time it is. There is a clock on my stove, another on my microwave. But all these readouts are digital. I learned how to tell time on analog clocks.

A clock face is a time pie. I measure out a day in pie-slice increments. I convert those numbers to analog clock in my mind. Five minutes is a sliver of it, fifteen is a wedge. I know what I can accomplish in one third of a clock face, how far I can drive, how long I can talk on the phone. My relationship to time will always be spatial, like the kind of time I learned to keep on the Fisher Price clock.

*

I had a house fire in 2006. Almost twenty years later, I’m still trying to sort through what I own. This past summer, I opened a box and found my Fisher-Price Clock. It’s worn, but it works. I inspected it carefully, delighted by what I had remembered, intrigued by what I had not.

On the back, there is a more detailed breakdown of a child’s day, hour by hour. If we start at the top, then a child is sitting at a table having a midnight snack, or else he’s eating lunch. My money is on lunch. The day goes on. Reading with grandma at 1, napping at 2, shopping with Mom at 3, going down a slide at 4, taking a bubble bath at 5, eating again at 6, waking up to a rooster crowing at 7, eating breakfast at 8, taking the lamb to school at 9, working in the classroom at 10, and riding bikes at 11.

So clear, the message. So orderly. Time passing. Days passing. Even years are passing on this clock, because on one side, four kids look out windows into four different seasons. So many hours, days, seasons, years.

I have had this clock for 61 years.

Tick tock, tick tock.