121. Farther Up The Road

In the semi darkness of the living room, lit only by the street light from outside, I stepped up to the clock, opened the little door and stopped the pendulum. I moved the hands ahead to 4 a.m. so it would look like the clock had given up the ghost in the middle of the night. I felt like a burglar in our own living room. Carefully closing up the clock, I turned to go back to bed. My father sat across the room looking at me.

"It was keeping Micky awake," I said.

"Me, too," said my father.

"You did a nice job fixing the clock," I told him.

“It’s not perfect,” he said, “but I gave it my best.”

“It’s better than I could have done,” I said.

”I'm sorry that I didn't let you help me," he said. “I really got wrapped up in it. It felt like something I had to do.”

I wondered if calling Ben the night we brought home the clock parts had also been something my father felt he had to do.

“Why did you apologize to Ben?” I asked.

“Because I was wrong,” he said. “I stomped out of a man’s house without having an honest conversation about why I was angry with him. And I should have had it long ago.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said he knew he had a big mouth and it was a problem. He told me no one else visits them any more.”

“Will we?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Aunt Mary is the only relative Grandma has left.”

Grandma died the next year and after the funeral we lost track of Cousin Ben and Aunt Mary. But they stopped by the restaurant when we celebrated my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary a decade later. I was lucky enough to be home on leave from Africa. I recognized Ben as soon as he stepped through the door. He hadn’t aged that much in ten years and he remembered me by name. He surprised me, saying he often recalled our conversations with pleasure and always thought we were a lot alike. I didn’t get upset. He may have been right. When I asked if he still fixed clocks, he smiled and looked away while saying, “only my own.”

Ben’s pile of parts, assembled by my father into a noisy clock, ticked away on the mantel for over thirty years. It sold at a garage sale when my parents moved to a senior apartment. After my father died, I was sorry we let it go.

So last week in the flea market I wished I had no vows to prevent me from taking the clock home and putting it on a mantel. It would serve as a reminder of the man who overcame the ordinary troubles of life to become a wonderfully ordinary father to me. He never became perfect. Neither did I.

As I grew to manhood, he allowed me more control over my own destiny and seldom gave advice without my asking for it. When I struggled to accept my burdens and find my gifts as a young man, he stood back armed only with hope and let me search out my own paths, allowing me to cope with life at the speed of my own heartbeat. He waited on the path for me. He may still, for in addition to the sound of my own clock, I sometimes hear another softly ticking up ahead.