Grandfather Clock, Stopped and Started

The clock came from my grandfather's hallway and its sound is the sound of every childhood visit — a heavy, patient tock you felt in the floorboards. He wound it every evening after the news, a small ceremony with a brass crank he kept in a teacup.

When he moved to the care home, the clock came to us, and I kept his schedule: every evening, after the news, the teacup, the crank. It never missed.

On a Tuesday in January it stopped at 4:52 in the afternoon. My wife heard the silence — you don't notice a clock until it stops mid-tock. She texted me a photo of the frozen face with the caption 'your clock's on strike.' The call from the care home came forty minutes later. He had died, peacefully, in his chair, at approximately 4:50.

I know what a wound clock stopping takes. I had wound it the night before.

We tried to restart it, out of some confused instinct, and it wouldn't go. A horologist — a serious man with jeweller's glasses — serviced it twice that year and pronounced it mechanically perfect and inexplicably immobile. 'The train is free, the mainspring is sound. It should run. It declines.' He actually wrote 'declines' on the invoice. I framed the invoice.

It stood silent in our hallway for thirteen months, a very tall gravestone, and I could not make myself sell it.

My daughter — his first great-grandchild — was born on a February morning at 6:14. We came home from the hospital two days later to a ticking house. The clock was running. Correct time, mid-tock, as though it had never stopped. Nobody had touched it; the crank was in the teacup where it had gathered a year of dust, and the dust was undisturbed.

The horologist came back out at my invitation, listened for a long time, and finally said: 'Some of them keep family time, not clock time. I'd stop asking it questions.'

It has kept both, flawlessly, ever since. I wind it every evening. After the news.