A couple blogs ago I quoted English poet John Keats who said, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Let me add, it can also be a profound irritant.
Case in point: For Earl’s seventieth birthday I commissioned a woodworker to build a beautiful clock, one that would hang on our wall and chime every fifteen minutes as well as on the hour. It was not a commission the woodworker took lightly. He investigated various clock mechanisms that would eventually rest inside his hand-crafted cabinet, and we went back and forth about the final visual look of the piece.
A couple months passed and the woodworker called to say the clock was done. When could he come and hang it for us? We quickly chose a date and his contribution to Earl’s gift was complete. Little did I know that was just the beginning for me.
This clock is the old-fashioned type; not one of those you plug into an electric socket for a digital read-out or one you infuse with a battery for the same result. No, it had to be wound with regularity. But I am of the age where my first watch was like that, so I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I was wrong.
There are a lot more issues in a wall clock than in a wristwatch. First, in this kind of clock, there is a pendulum that swings left to right and back again. The swing of the pendulum represents the tick of the clock. And, for the clock to keep perfect time, the swing must be aligned half to the left and half to the right in exact measures. Sometimes it swings longer to one side that the other, which causes the clock to stop altogether. Then you have to perform something akin to surgery to get the tick even.
There is also a knob on the pendulum that regulates the speed at which it swings. If the knob is too high, the clock’s tick is fast, causing it to gain time; if it’s too low, the clock loses times. So you have to find what I call the “sweet spot,” right in the middle where the tick is split in half and speed of the pendulum is the same as the speed of time. It’s quite a challenge, one that I probably wouldn’t have taken on had I known in advance.
It’s taken months of study with this clock to learn its personality. There were weeks when I charted how I moved the knob to acquire perfecting time. There were also weeks when I had to perform more than one remedial surgery on the tick. But in the end the clock and I have become friends. It behaves for the most part, and I know what to do when it doesn’t. Which prompts me to conclude that this thing of beauty is indeed a joy forever. If it outlives me, however, someone else will have to experience the learning curve to agree.
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