The Sound of Silence

Okay, I've written here before about our antique cuckoo clock--and how, during this pandemic, its bird has self-quarantined. No more ticking. No more emerging from the clock. No more cuckooing.

Let me back up to remind you a bit about that clock before I begin to wax sentimental ...

It originally belonged to my great-grandfather Warren A. Lanterman (1866-1963), who lived on a farm in Austintown, Ohio (Four Mile Run Road), for about ninety years. (The farmhouse was razed years ago.) In his final years, he moved out to Enid, Oklahoma, where his daughter, my grandmother Alma E. Osborn (my mom's mom, 1896-1978), could care for him--which she did until he died.

We visited that farm when I was a wee one, and I remember that clock very well--and I remember, too, how Grandpa Lanterman had beheaded a chicken for our supper--how that headless chicken ran around the barnyard a bit before Reality caught up with him, and down he went--on the ground and, later, our throats.

I never again in my life had to wonder about that expression like a chicken with its head cut off.

When Grandpa Lanterman left the farm, the cuckoo clock came to us in Hiram, and it hung and cuckooed on our wall throughout my youth.

In the late summer of 1966, my parents moved out to Des Moines, Iowa, where they would both teach at Drake University. The clock went with them.

In 1978 my grandmother Osborn died out in Columbia, Missouri, where she and her husband, who pre-deceased her, retired. That same year, my parents, now both retired, headed out to live in Cannon Beach, Oregon, in a home they built on the slope of Tillamook Head leading up to Ecola State Park. And Joyce and I acquired the cuckoo clock, which has hung on our wall ever since.

It's lived in Kent, Ohio; Lake Forest, Illinois; Hudson, Ohio; Aurora, Ohio; Hudson, Ohio, again.

Our little boy loved it. His sons have loved it. One of these days it will pass on to them.

But recently ... it quit, as I said. (We have had it repaired a few previous times in its forty-plus years with us.)

Okay--one quick repair story ... When our son was 6, we were living in Lake Forest, and one day one of his friends came over, got curious about the cuckoo clock, climbed up on a chair for a closer look, and when the bird popped out, he grabbed it. Off for repair we went--for the clock, not for the little boy.

In these COVID times we're cautious about calling our Clock Guy to come pick it up for repair, so we'll probably wait until things settle down a little bit more.

I've tried re-starting it a few times--adjusting its position on the wall a little, listening for a solid tick-tock. Last week one day it ran for about six hours, and I was ecstatic.

Then it stopped and would not run for more than a minute or so after my subsequent adjustment.

Meanwhile, I can't stand its sound of silence. I've been so used to hearing it in the night (it cuckoos on the hour and half-hour), throughout the day. As I said in a previous post about it, it has been, in many ways, the steady heartbeat of our house.

I even miss pulling the chains that "wind" it twice a day--morning and evening. It hangs right by our front door, right by our steps leading upstairs, and it has been part of my going-to-bed routine for decades, pulling those chains.

Now when I go by it each evening, I feel I've lost something. Reproachfully--regretfully--I look at it and urge it to come back to life.

And, honestly, there are times during the day--in my study--in the family room--when I am positive I've just heard it.

Maybe the little bird is just telling me: I'm still here--I'll be out again soon.

And don't I hope so!



Link to Simon & Garfunkel and "The Sound of Silence."