Two weeks ago, the measuring tape broke. I felt a small jab at my heart, as I tried to push it back in, tried to fix the hopelessly bent and broken metal reel. I took it apart. Twice. To no avail, the thing had served me well for years, but had nothing left to give. I shouldn’t be attached to a measuring tape, I thought. This is some form of mental illness. It was my Dads, I remember him giving it to me like a right of passage. This was important to me at the time, as I took it to mean, you can do anything you want to. If you want to build it, just do it, and don’t wait for somebody else to do it for you. In his mind he was most likely thinking “Good, now I can go out and get a new measuring tape.” As children, we attach importance to things and it sticks. If we need a message, we make one up, and hold fast to it, needing meaningful moments more than air or water. My Dad’s been gone over a decade now, and the “things” I have left from him are few. If they break, or I lose them, I will have to go into some private mourning, all the while telling myself how ridiculous I am.

It’s true for most people, I think, this need for the small items of remembrance. And I happen to be one of those people who think if you own an object long enough, part of it becomes a part of you. Things don’t have souls, they aren’t receptacles for emotion, though I know others feel the same, and many a horror writer will say that things do have a life of their own.

I decided after losing one such object, I would gain another.

When my Grandmother died, and then my Grandfather, there was the task of assessing items to family members. There was only one thing I wanted, the kitchen clock. It was a white metal Westclox, bold numbered, slightly art deco in it’s styling. It’s bubble front watched over the kitchen like a plexiglass retina. It was a plug-in with a four-inch cord, and I think my grandfather must have installed an outlet above the sink just to accommodate this little thing. There it sat, always. It had along its life acquired a ticking, a humming, announcing its presence. Every time the power went out, someone had to climb up on the step-ladder, and re-set it. But it was faithful, like my grandparents. It kept humming along through babies and then children, and then the children’s children, through tragedy and through happiness, it was there. And I like to think that as my Grandmother poured the Palmolive into the sink, the bubbles frothing in a greenish perfume, that all her thoughts floated upward, her prayers and her intimacies, and that along the way the clock was there to catch them. I lugged the clock from apartment to apartment, place to place. It could only ever be just above the stove, due to the cord. It humming kept me happy, left me feeling safe, like Grandma’s house did.

One day Mom was visiting our Toronto apartment, standing in the kitchen, drinking coffee in her robe. She suddenly looked stunned. “I’m having such déjà vu right now”, she said…searching for why. “It’s the clock, Mom,” I said, and we both laughed. The noise behind her, the kitchen puttering, the smell of coffee. It was what she grew up with. It was home, even though that home was long behind her.

Then came the repairman, as the fridge was on the fritz. I went to move the clock out of his way as he was pulling the fridge away from the wall, and I dropped it on the counter, shattering its protective bubble. I gasped like I’d been punched. He looked at me sideways, sensing something really disastrous had just occurred, and stopped what he was doing. He picked it up like a baby bird, turned it over.

“You can get the glass repaired,” he said, a small offering of hope and condolence.

I nodded, and swept the glass into the trash. A piece of one dial had snapped off. I laid the clock on the kitchen table and excused myself, and went to my bedroom and had a good cry, feeling like I had just killed something inside my own mechanisms.

Fast forward to two weeks ago. I’d still been lugging the clock around, and it would hang in some out-of-the-way place, like a laundry room or a garage, reminding me that I could still look at it and remember. The paper had warped, the metal was rusting in one spot, but it was my holy relic. I pulled it off the wall, and searched on ebay. Lo and behold, a twin, in teal. It didn’t work, was listed for parts. I bought it and waited, thinking, we can fix this. I can fix this, and have her back. Part of me thought if a tiny bit of Grandma lived in there, that I would do anything to get it back, that I needed her now, needed her calm resolute nature, her wisdom.

Then the news from the watchmaker, the clock repairman, the “guy who can fix anything.”

“Welllll…..you could try to bend this metal back, though it will most likely snap off. And you can’t use this warped face, because it will mess with the dials, one of which is broken. You could try to put your motor in the blue one….”
“You keep saying you..” I asked. “You don’t want to fix it? “

“Well, I can try, but honestly it isn’t worth my time. It will cost you lots and may not even work well, or work until it gets that ttickkk—hmmmmm sound and then get louder until it just stops.”
I was familiar with that sound. It had been getting louder as the years wore on. Possibly, just possibly, it had been close to death when I dropped it.

“These clocks were meant to be thrown away. They weren’t made very well to begin with.”

I looked at him in horror. He quickly realized I was one of those people.

“I had a guy come in here the other day who sent a watch off to England to get it repaired, hundreds of dollars. Six months later, he comes to me…I can’t fix it either. Some times these things just can’t be fixed.”

I thanked him and went back to my car, with my two not working clocks. I took a deep breath, and then remembered the scene from Pulp Fiction where Christopher Walken explains to a kid that the watch before him had been smuggled in his dad’s ass during the war, and was now finally his, his legacy. And then I had a good laugh. At least no one had to smuggle this clock in their ass, and thank god we didn’t have asses big enough to accommodate such a thing, because if we did we’d be on that ‘Things Seen at Wall Mart “ site, and then I had another laugh and realized that my Grandmother was with me, right there in the car, making me laugh. It was ok. I could let it go.

Now the clocks are in a box on my counter, and I will take them out to the workshop. I will try, and see what happens when I use my handy-woman skills on it. If I fail, I will be okay with it, I will let it go… but I’m going to bury them in the backyard.