the ticking of a thousand clocks

yesterday while typing up a comment on dan's blog, i realized that i'd been sitting at my desk for a good solid two minutes, just listening to the clocks in our living room.

they both read the same time. but due to the fact that humanity had a part in setting that time, they are off, by just a second or two. they don't tick in tandem; they tick separately, never leaving a space between them wherein there is actual silence.

upstairs we have two ticking clocks, in addition to the myriad electronic alarms, but they are in separate rooms; if they do not track time at the same instant, you do not know. it's only in the living room that you hear these two.

i remember when i was a child reading a story about a puppy being just brought home, and how the father puts a hot water bottle and a clock in the little puppy's box, to soothe him. the clock is supposed to remind him of his mother's heartbeat.

truthfully, it doesn't sound that far off, if you muffle it with your pillow.

i also remember laying in the basement of my grandma's house. interesting that at my father's parents home we slept in the upstairs bedrooms, while at my mother's home we slept in the basement. it's all about area, i suppose, and a family of six takes up considerable space. anyway, in my grandma's basement the walls were painted a pale turquoise, almost white, and they leaned in, shoved by frost in the winter. there was a beer sign on the wall--budwieser, i think--that one of my uncles installed in their youth. the bar light was our night light, red and white neon against those turquoise walls.

my mom's home town is steam heated. when the heat kicked on at grandma's house, the radiators were silent. but in the basement, the pipes clicked and made odd noises. at least odd in the light of three am, i guess.

at any rate, being a light sleeper even as a child, i'd wake up at night and in wobbly sleep-vision, see those walls, pressing in and wavering. i'd hear the pipes clanging, a sound i never heard at home in the land of natural gas furnaces. i only hear with my right ear; the left is nerve damaged and deaf. so i'd put my good ear on the pillow, to drown out the pipe noises, and that is when i would hear the footsteps.

soft, at first. slow and steady. and then, as i panicked, they'd speed up. for hours i'd lay there, frozen, waiting for a man to come out of those bowed turquoise walls and step into the darkness of the basement, perhaps take a seat on the brown sofa from 1952 that felt like astroturf rather than fabric, or lean up against the three television sets stacked in the corner.

it wasn't until years later, after suffering through visits during which i'd play dead to avoid the man in the blue walls, that i realized that the footsteps i'd heard were the pulse of my own heartbeat, throbbing in my temple, pressed against the pillow.

***

i'm still a light sleeper. at night, everything wakes me, even though i don't hear well at all. perhaps that is the reason i am a light sleeper--during the day, i am always straining to hear things, so it stands to reason that that alert would remain through the night.

it also explains why hearing these clocks annoys me, but the other people in my house probably do not even notice. their focus on sound is very different than mine, more relaxed.

sometimes i have to take sleep aids, to keep me drowsy enough to fall back asleep. it annoys me to do so, because i sleep deeply but i wake drowsy and it takes quite a while for that feeling to wear off. this morning, when i am awake and my cats are starting their daylight nap, the noise surrounds me: the heater, clicking and whooshing to life, the cars on the street, the sound of a neighbor going down stairs. somewhere there is a high pitched whine, as if off a television. my fingers on the keys, and the ticking of those two clocks.

***

a thousand clocks regulate life. as a rule the one which we are most attuned to and yet most ignore is that of our own inner clock, our heart. it's not until the night, when you lay in the deep of your bed, that you focus and pay attention to your very own pulse, that you can hear your heart, thudding its own rhythm in a bony cage.

the clock inside--that is the clock to which i should listen, i think. and yet i am dominated by the clocks that tick in my house: the alarm, the wristwatch, time running down sun.

usually i am not constrained by the ticking of clocks. i like to pretend that i am free as lynyrd skynyrd's bird. but the clock winds down, at some point. i see that clock in my parents, and suddenly my life is all about the time remaining. it seems often that i have frittered away my life, living outside time in my own pretend land. i have time left, if i care for my body, during which i can make the most of the little lapse between the ticking of my two clocks.