Time

Westclox "Big Ben"

I began writing this some time ago and today a nudge from a friend brought it back to my memory.

Tick … from the old Westclox Big Ben was one of the few sounds which reached my ears on a hot June afternoon in 1952. Even little boys in the wide-open countryside get bored on wonderful sunny days when there is no else around to play with and the humid air sticks to the skin and fierce sunshine tries to push the shoulders down around my waist. All I wanted was to get in some dryer shade and I moseyed into my grandmother’s living room in the small, clapboard farm-style house a mile from Jonesboro, Tennessee. Tick … Close family all referred to my grandmother as “Mom” and that suited me fine. None of her real given names were hard to pronounce–Julia Ada—but her few friends called her Ade.

Dink … the clock said “dink” every thirty minutes as it tried to get up enough nerve to sound an alarm, or maybe it had plenty of nerve but at its age a puny dink was the best it could do. Anyway, when Mom was sitting in the living room as she was this afternoon, all she had to do was look at the clock one time and thereafter the pathetic dink would advise her of time’s passing without her having to raise her eyes to the top shelf of the mantle where the aged, ivory-colored clock-face ruled over small, framed family photos.

All the windows in the house were open and sometimes a small breeze filtered through rusting screens, carrying sounds of birds and bugs and chickens and pigs as they tried to hunker down from oppressive heat. The old house was cool enough inside, particularly the north facing front where the living room and Mom’s—and mine—bedroom was located; it was the bedroom where I was born on a similar afternoon some seven years earlier. White paint on the wooden sides and a shiny metal roof sent most of the sun’s rays scurrying off to find something else to torment. Even heat from the well used adjacent kitchen dared not trespass north of its own domain.

This is all I have so far but will do some more as I feel up to it.