What time is it anyway? One son’s story

Condolences to the Rev. Martin Elfert whose mother recently died. He has written beautifully of her later years and of his experience in losing a parent. I hope readers enjoy the delightful story he shared today on Facebook. Some of you will have met Martin while he worked at the Sorrento Centre for many years. Shared with permission and encouragement.

[Martin Elfert] One of the little things that I inherited from Mom is her clock radio. I decided to put it down in my workshop: I reckoned that it would be good to know what time it is; good to be able to listen to music with the press of a button (and without having to climb into the thousand distractions of the internet); good to remember happy days in Mom and Dad’s kitchen.

Except that, whenever I went downstairs to the shop, I looked over to see that the time on the clock radio was wrong. And so I would reset it. And then, later on that same day, the time would be wrong again.

The clock radio had gone nuts.

Now, everything in my life is a metaphor. And so I got ready to write you a reflection on how Mom’s clock radio, with its all over the map time (it’s midnight at two-fifteen in the afternoon!) is an outward and visible sign of loss and grief and the disorientation wrought by both. The clock radio is my answer – and Mom’s answer – to “My Grandfather’s Clock.” You know the one that stopped, short, never to go again when the old man died.

Except shortly before I started writing you I noticed:

I had plugged the clock radio into a power outlet controlled by a switch. I was, therefore, turning the clock radio off and resetting it to midnight every time that I turned off the lights in the shop.

[Salman] Rushdie said maybe my favourite thing ever about metaphors. He said, “Good metaphors shock.” Good metaphors take you aback with the dissonance of this thing being like that very different thing; with the unexpectedness of seeing two strangers walking together, their ideas holding hands. I don’t know if Rushdie was talking about moments such as this. But I will reach for his words anyway.

This is a shocking metaphor.

There’s nothing wrong with the clock. It’s fine. I am the one who doesn’t know what time it is.