12:00

My grandmother’s birthday is today. It would have been her 97th. After hitting the ninety-six previous birthdays in a row without fail, she’ll miss this one, and I’ll miss her, as I miss my grandfather who left eight years ago. That was hard and took me a long time to move past, to the degree that I’ve even moved past it yet. I wonder how long it will take this time. 

I’d seen her about a week before when I went over to her place to give her a backup power supply for her Bose radio. Every time the power even flickered for a moment at her retirement home, the clock on the Bose would reset, flashing 12:00am. Every time I visited her I’d have to reset it, and sometimes she’d even call when the flashing began to get to her before I noticed it for myself. Sometimes the power would go out for a second the day after I’d reset the clock, and she’d not want to bother me about it so soon. But the next time I was over…. There is was. The flashing clock.

So, finally, after over ten years of this battle with the digital radio clock, I purchased the backup power supply so this would never happen again. It was a Friday, I arrived around lunchtime, and saw she was eating lunch at her table with the three other “elder statesmen” of the retirement home. In this group my grandmother wasn’t the oldest member. She wasn’t even the second oldest. There was, as my grandmother referred to her, “a little old lady” who was 101, and there was another who was 97. My grandmother was a “young kid” at 96, and the last of the group was 91 or something. A mere baby. 

I pulled up a chair and tried to describe to my grandmother what I’d brought, but told her it would be easier to just show her than explain yet another piece of technology that she really didn’t need to worry about, so we walked up to her room and I plugged it in. I explained that the time on the radio would always be correct, now, that she wouldn’t have to rely on me to reset the clock every other day due to the poor wiring in the retirement home. She was happy, but wasn’t sure if she needed to do anything, to reset anything, to flick any switches herself. I assured her she didn’t have to do a thing, that the time would be correct from now on.  As I left I gave her a hug and kissed the top of her head and told her I loved her. (I lucked out there).

However, as bad luck would have it, the Sunday a week later  was the end of Daylight Savings time, so that morning her clock was now off by an hour. I hadn’t thought of this, I had forgotten to mention that twice a year the clock would still have to be changed. She called me the next Monday and left a message on my answering machine. “Hank, the time changed this Sunday, so that clock is off an hour. Could you come by and fix it for me?”

We don’t get a lot of calls to our land line. In fact, my grandmother usually called on my cell. But this time, she called the land line and left a message. A message that I did not see until two days later, when I rushed home from work after getting the news that she had died.

 

The message still sits there on the machine, her last communication with me, about a clock that I took ten years to fix, only to have it finally keep the correct time for just the final week of her life. It’s as if that clock knew something the rest of us didn’t, counting down the years, hours, minutes, and seconds of a life well-lived, but finite none the less. So yes, it’s going to take a long time for the pain of her not being here to pass (or at least subside), and I hope I it’s a very long time before I see another flashing digital clock.