As the new year opens to winter’s blossom, I find myself wistfully thinking about time. And this morning, as I entered our house after shopping, I heard our old chiming clock mark the hour. It was running slow, so I put my bags down and wound it with its clock key, which I hide beneath its sturdy wooden legs. I’m amazed that with kids in the house, we’ve never lost the key or broken the clock (purchased as a shared wedding anniversary gift). When I hear our clock chime–no matter how frazzled I’m feeling–I believe that I have a charmed life.

Apparently, I am not alone in thinking that chiming clocks are important to have around. Charles Ditmas, the man who kept the clocks at Harvard University for more than fifty years, once wrote in an unpublished essay quoted in his New York Times obituary
last year: “It is a constant wonder to me, how many people today have never lived with clocks, do not know them, are not aware of what the presence of a clock in the home means. I speak of real clocks, rather than battery clocks or electric clocks that so often exhibit hideous designs, fake pretensions and vulgar proportions.”

Well! Thomas Jefferson kept chiming clocks in every room of Monticello. Here’s something I found that explains some of his complicated feelings about time and its inevitable march:

“The Enlightenment tried to think of time as flowing with the growth of reason and understanding in an improving universe…Jefferson made it an absolute duty to subordinate time to the accumulation of knowledge. Idleness was the great sin in his secular theology, and time represented both a measure and a disruption to be reckoned with at every moment….He knew and accepted that time would cut across his plans as surely as the mechanism of the hall clock required an unsightly hole in his floor. Vigilance was both the price and the reward of intelligence.”

Chiming clocks have good feng shui. They lend motion and music to a quiet house. I don’t hear ours chiming from downstairs after bedtime, but when I am up at odd hours, I love its company. I recommend that you go out and find a clock in a local antique shop, or ask somebody who loves you to be on the look-out. I hesitate to recommend online sources–though eBay.com might provide an interesting start–since I purchased a clock with a pendulum from an online clock shop, and the pendulum doesn’t swing anymore. You’ll find your way to the right one. And your local yellow pages will lead you to the best clock doctors; they are almost always spiritual people.