What was the last best thing you wrote?
Here is an excerpt from the prologue of a book I began writing in spring 2019 called The Other Side of the Moon. It may not be the last best thing I wrote, but it is the last most complete thing.
Please share your last best thing in the comments!
“Crimson Tide,” “The Red Wedding,” “Carrie,” “Shark Week.” Young women have fun ways of referring to what my mother, with no pop cultural references whatsoever simply called being “on the rag.” The first time one of my female college first years emailed me to explain she had “checked in at the Red Roof Inn” and wouldn’t be in class, I sent back a note that said choosing to leave early for vacation was not an absence I could excuse.
A week later, possibly because she trusted me as a woman – we all bleed, after all – but more likely because she wanted to point out all the feminist stuff I talked about was actually a load of personal bullshit when you got right down to it, my female student hugged her neatly organized English composition binder and “The Writer’s Reference” to her chest and explained what she meant was she got her period. It was heavy, and she got “really bad” cramps. Did she need a doctor’s note to have it excused?
That was 12 years ago. I was 37. My kids – all boys – were 9, 6, and 3. I’d spent a decade giving birth to them, and burying the women I called Mum, Nana, and Spike. I was too tired, too busy, and too caught up in cobbling together a version of motherhood based on a faulty sense of what was “normal,” and certain television role models, like Caroline Ingalls of Little House on the Prairie and Caroline Brady of The Brady Bunch to keep up with evolving feminine slang.
I became pop culture illiterate when I became a mother in 1999. The last television show I watched with fervent regularity – The X Files – aired in the late ‘90s. I might see a movie in a cinema once a year, on my birthday. Once it was Cold Mountain with Nana and Mum. Another it was a French film called Amelie.
There was no Urban Dictionary. No Netflix, Spotify or iTunes, no Facebook, no apps of any kind. Nothing was on demand. My music library was kept in a box of mixed cassette tapes given to me to listen to on my car stereo by boys who told me love stories in songs by Alice in Chains and Mother Love Bone, or Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead, or deep back catalog Bob Dylan and even more obscure Tom Waits.
They were very different boys.
I am 48.5 now. My children are on the launch pad of the rest of their lives. I know that Aunt Flo doesn’t come from Aroostook County, a Quebecois widow born Florence who drives south of Bangor once a month to have her toenails trimmed by a podiatrist her sister recommends, to marvel at the forsythia already waving in the sun, and to eat lunch at Cole Farms. She loves the homemade rolls.
But I’m pretty sure Rosie O’Monthly, my own personifying name for my period might be a Scotch-Irish fisherman’s wife, reminding me of New England boiled dinners with cabbage, potatoes, carrots and ham, and Pabst Blue Ribbon with a whiskey back.
Rosie wears big sunglasses that hold back a velvet sheet of black hair. She likes paisley print cropped corduroys and strapless halter tops she wears braless so her nipples dot the bib like perfectly spaced buttons. She shows up in sandals with a backstrap so her rough heels don’t slide out. Rosie drinks Diet Pepsi in a paper cup. Everything is paper so she can throw it away when she’s done instead of washing, drying it and putting it on a shelf. Rosie takes a broom to them when the grown men who used to be her little boys start wrestling in the kitchen, whacking the corn bristles on their backs and heads until they knock it the hell off. And Rosie is baked macaroni and cheese with buttered toast cubes on top, barely visible under a layer of black pepper and salt, and canned peas on the side sliding around in oleo.
Rosie is my sure thing, coming to me every month since 1982 when I was 11. She arrives like a Buick rumbling onto the gravel of a driveway, rolling down a window, slowly pulling the sunglasses above her bangs. I greet her with relief, pour a cup of tea, and build a fortress of pillows and blankets around us. She’s a wacko, but despite her colorful character, I know I can count on her like no one else. She’s the solution to all my recent problems. The sun coming out on a cloudy day.
Raye S. Leonard 
I assume this is the place to leave my latest writing. If not, just toss it into the bit bucket. The attached is a memoir piece recently done. It might be a bit long, but just as Mozart could not delete a few notes here and there to make his piece shorter, neither can I delete a letter or a word.
The Clock
by J. R. Ryan
“My Grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf
So it stood ninety years on the floor
It was taller by half than the old man himself
But it weighed not a pennyweight more
It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born
It was always his treasure and pride
But it stopped, short, never to go again
When the old man died.”
These are just part of the lyrics to “My Grandfather’s Clock” which was written in 1876 by Henry Work. It tells the tale of the clock from a grandchild’s point of view and I remember hearing this song as a child, but it has only recently come to the front of my memory.
* * * * *
The clock pictured here was given to my parents as a present on the day that they were married in Liverpool, England in the year 1938. It is a small clock befitting the financial ability of the person who gave it. In those days, clocks were not ubiquitous. There were no LEDs in the bedroom, no clock on a smart phone, not much in the way of clocks encircling wrists, but perhaps a pocket watch on a chain for those affluent enough to own one. My father was not affluent enough. But, this clock was a valued acquisition and sat proudly on the mantle over the fireplace hearth and set the rhythm of the family. Each night my father would wind the clock just before going to bed. It was a ritual because if the springs wound down, the clock would slow down and would eventually stop. And, so each night he would open the front bezel, pick up the winding key, and turn each spring to its maximum.
We had little in the way of luxuries. There was a coal fireplace in each room but coal was far too expensive to burn and heat rooms that were not used, so most doors were closed. The bedrooms were cold and the living room was the only heated place. As the coal burned in the fireplace, the clock kept watch on the mantle. In the winter a hot water bottle was the only respite for frozen feet. Gas provided for light after dark and heat for cooking and hot water. But, the clock did not need electricity and it ran and chimed through winter and summer. It even chimed as the German bombs dropped and neighbors died. It seemed that this little clock was keeping the family safe. There is a theory in philosophy called Panpsychism. And, according to this doctrine, everything material has some element of consciousness according to its need and that this consciousness is an essential feature of reality. This doctrine is not new. It has been around since the ancient Greek philosophers. But, now scientist philosophers are considering whether the electrons and quarks that make up all of matter also have some elements of consciousness. Perhaps, this clock was aware, within its own limits, of its purpose in life.
One of the attractive features of this clock is that it has what is called Big Ben chimes. It chimes 4 times on the quarter hour, 8 times on the half hour, 12 times on the three quarter hour, and 16 times on the hour – followed by one additional chime for each hour. So at noon and midnight, this clock chimes 28 times. There is no need to look at the face of the clock to know the time. It informs everyone inside the house no matter which room a person was in.
In the early morning hours as I snuggled under the blankets I could hear the chime and knew the relative position of the hour until it chimed on the hour. At 6 AM, I could pull the covers over my head and know that another comfortable hour of twilight sleep could be mine before I had to arise and get ready for school, and as each fifteen minutes of my life passed, the clock chimed the passage. And even during the day, the chimes informed the family of the time. Noon, time for lunch. Three o’clock, time to watch for the children coming home from school. Six o’clock and dinner on the table. The chimes, in the background, informed the family of the routine and followed all the events of the year. I remember waiting in anticipation for the clock to strike 28 times to begin the New Year. Parents, uncles and aunts and nephews around the fireplace watching the clock and all counting down on each chime to the next year — toasting, hopefully, a better year.
When I was 5 years of age, we got a dog – probably at my insistence – and I was given the right to name the dog. So, I named it Mick. Not a very creative and imaginative name but then again I was not very creative. A few months after Mick’s arrival, he went out on a walkabout and did not come back. Although my father and I searched the entire neighborhood, Mick was nowhere to be found. And that would have been the end of dogs in the house except… except a year later there was a knock on our front door. My mother answered and I could see it was Mrs. Berslam, our next door neighbor.
“There’s a dog roaming the street”, said Mrs. Berslam. “And, I think its your Mick.”
“Our Mick?”, responded my mother.
“Yes,” continued the conversation, “Your Mick”.
Sure enough, prancing up the street was a dog that could have been our Mick if you added a year since the last time we saw it. When it saw our open door, it bolted up the street, ran between my mother’s legs, raced through the vestibule, and the living room and on into the kitchen and out the back door and started digging a hole in a small patch of dirt that might, in some previous generation or other, had some flowers. After a few minutes of furious digging, this dog came up with a bone.
“Well,” said my mother, “It looks like our Mick is back.” I’m not sure she was happy about that, but I was.
From then on the dog was always referred to as Our Mick. And, in the early morning hours as I could hear the clock chime and I would reach down and scratch Our Mick’s head and stroke his ears. I knew I had more time to sleep, at least until Our Mick heard someone in the kitchen and then he would bolt down the stairs looking for food. Our Mick’s faithfulness only went as far as his empty belly.
* * * *
My parents decided to emigrate to the United States at the prompting of my father’s brother and so everything my parents owned had to be sold. I remember the auctioneer at the front of our home bringing out my parent’s property and asking for bids. Tables, chairs, cooking pots, sheets, towels, everything had to go, even the clock and Our Mick. All my parents could bring was whatever they could carry in one suitcase each and a smaller one for me. My mother packed some mementos like a set of bone handle knives and forks (very upscale to poor folks such as us) that she could not part with, some old World War II ration books, and a few postage stamps of a King who abdicated a realm for the woman he loved. Small stuff could be packed, but not the clock. Their brightest wedding present was sold. The clock had chimed when they moved into their first home, chimed when I was born, probably chimed when I was created, chimed during my mother’s labor, chimed during the Blitz, chimed when I named Mick, and chimed when he came back, it chimed when my Grandmother died and at her wake in our front parlor, and finally chimed as proof of function when the auctioneer sold it. The clock and Our Mick, two members of the family, had to stay behind.
My parents struggled for a few years as do most immigrants but finally their roots took hold in America. Then one year, my Uncle Mickey, who was serving on an ocean liner coming from Liverpool, showed up at the front door with the clock under his arm. Most of the males in my family were seafarers. It was one of the few options available to the working class. They left school at 14 and, with no possibility of high school or college education, they either went to work on the docks – and only worked when the ships were in port – or they went to sea in the Merchant Marine. Almost all the males in my family – uncles and cousins – went to sea. It seemed that, even though they wanted to be with their families and be at home, they could not stay at home. There must have been some kind of wanderlust gene in the family for they all seemed to wanted to see “far away places with strange sounding names”. Or. As the Irish say, “they have a bit of the Traveler in them.”. Other young lads might get a somewhat permanent job but my father was lucky in that at 14-years of age, he started apprenticing as a painter and decorator. It took seven years for him to obtain his master’s papers and then, in the middle of the depression, the only work he could find was on the docks. No one could afford to have their houses painted. Food was more important. However, his decision to apprentice made when he was 14-years of age, affected my life when I was 18-years of age. Had he made a different choice, my life would not have been the same. But, that is for another story.
When Mickey walked in the door, I remember my father looking at him and saying, “Where in bloody hell did you get that?”, referring to the clock. Mickey said that the woman who bought the clock had no intention of keeping it. She just did not want some stranger to buy it because she knew just how much it meant to my parents. After all, it was a wedding gift. It took this woman a few years to trace my mother’s family to find someone who could bring the clock across the ocean. So, now the clock was back where it belonged. Just like Our Mick, it found its way home.
* * * * *
My father died at 96-years of age. He was in a coma at home under the care of hospice having fought lung cancer for 9 years. For some reason, the entire family was at my house – kids, grand-kids, husbands, wives, nieces and nephews when someone shouted, “Grandpa is awake.”. They all knew he was dying and there was nothing much to be done. Everyone rushed into the bedroom and sure enough my father was awake and seemed to be coherent.
I half expected him to act like a Lazarus and get up to make a cup of tea. Every day in his life, he made my mother a cup of tea and brought it into the bedroom for her. Even on days he went to work, he would do this before leaving the house. My mother worked but she left the house later. A week before he went into a coma, he made her tea every morning. A ritual just like winding the clock. But, no. My father was not getting out of his deathbed even though we all had hopes., He looked at everyone, knew everyone, had a few nice words for all the grand-kids. My wife sat of the edge of his bed and she hugged him He said something to her but I never asked and she never told. Some words need to be kept in the heart. I hugged him and he whispered in my ear, “You’re a good son.”. That was the first complement my father ever gave me. He was a quiet man and a private man when it came to expressing any emotion. But, he was a good man and a good father, nevertheless. And to him I responded, “Ah, you’re not so bad yourself”, which brought a brief chuckle to his weakened frame. He then closed his eyes and never woke again.
A few days later, he took his last breath and left this life. And, sometime in between the time he closed his eyes and the time he took his last breath, the clock stopped running.
“But it stopped, short, never to go again
When the old man died”
Perhaps it knew that the old man was gone, or perhaps there was no one to wind the springs each evening to keep it alive. My mother lost the only man she ever loved, a man she had shared her life since she was 18-years of age – a span of almost 80 years.
She was one of fifteen children and she outlasted them all, and she outlasted all their husbands and wives. She outlasted my father’s brother and three sisters, and their husbands and wives. She outlasted many of her nieces and nephews. She outlasted all her childhood school friends, the people she worked with, the friends she had made in America. They all had aged out of life before her. The volumes of Christmas cards were now reduced to one or two from the grandchildren. And, she outlasted her husband. She died the year following my father at the age of 97. In the end, she had no one left and not even the clock chimes to raise memories of happier days.
* * * *
It then fell upon my wife and I go sort through the detritus of 80 years of two lives. Some things we kept. We kept the World War II ration books and postage stamps. The bone handle knives were lost long ago. And, we kept the clock. After my mother died, I tried to get the clock to work to no avail. I set the pendulum swinging and it just stopped after a minute or so. The springs were tightly wound so the clock should have worked. But, still we could not bear to just throw it out or send it to an antique shop. I worked the mathematics and realized that this clock chimes 558 times in twelve hours – or 1,116 times a day. This means that it chimes 7,812 times a week and 406,224 times a year. From the time they were married until by father died 72 years had passed – he died almost to the very day he was married – and, during this time, this clock had chimed 29,248,128 times. Such a clock needed a better end than in a landfill. So, it went into a plastic bin and into a storage unit with other remnants of family life.
* * * *
The clock sat silent in this storage locker while my son became the Mayor of a large city; while one of my daughters got married – again; while my wife of 50 years died of an incurable disease; and while I became reacquainted with a woman I had been in love with during my youth. . And, it sat silent as I was remarried to this second love. Another tale best kept for a later day – a tale of spiritual discovery. The clock which had kept the rhythm of the family for all these years was now silent.
Nine years later, in October of last year, we exhumed it from its plastic sarcophagus and brought it home. I had contacted a horologist, a clockmaker, and we had a conversation.
“Not worth your effort to fix it”, said John the Horologist.
“Why not?”
“I know these old clocks and it would cost you a few thousand dollars to get it back into working order and there is no guarantee that it could be done. New gears would probably have to be manufactured and that is really expensive.”
“What do you suggest?”. I had researched these clocks on the web and most of them were advertised as not working and were selling for a few hundred dollars.
“Just put it on a mantle or a shelf and use it for decoration”, John said.
Still, it just did not seem right. “Is there anything you can do?”, I persisted.
He thought about it for a while and said, “Look, I can take the mechanism out of the case and see what can be done, if anything, but we’d need to agree on a consultation price.”
And so we did. I could not have a man do work without payment.
Two months later John called and left a message on my cell phone. So, now was the time to find out how much this clock was going to cost and, somehow I knew I would agree to the price.
“It works”, he said. “I took the mechanism out and cleaned it an took a lot of dust and dirt out and, with a little bit of oil, it now works.”
And so just like Our Mick, the clock once again found its way home. I measured this old clock’s accuracy against my cell phone and found out the in the eighty-one years since it first arrived in the family, it has never lost a tick or gained a tock. The pendulum swung and kept as accurate a time as my cell phone. It now keeps the rhythm of the family once again. Physicists tell us that light comes in discreet quanta – identifiable chucks. They also propose that time itself also comes in discreet chunks. This clock also has discreet chucks of time. It chimes every 15 minutes breaking the day into measurable quanta. This clock is a constant in a world of uncontrolled chaos. It is a reminder to take life slower – to take life in fifteen minute increments and to savor the life we have.
* * * *
In the early hours of the morning as sleep becomes less available to me, I can hear the clock ring its comforting chimes and takes me back to my childhood, and England, and Our Mick. I have no need for an alarm. Generally, I rise first and go to the kitchen an make the first coffee of the morning. Before we were married and my wife was living the single life, she told me that on days when she did not have to get up early to teach a University class, she would make her coffee and then go back up the stairs and spend a few more minutes in bed before the chaos of the day began. So now, when I hear her rising, I pour her coffee and bring it upstairs and give her the private time she values. At those moments, as I sit on the edge of the bed amazed at my good fortune to have this woman in my life, and when I hear the clock chime, I realize that I have become my father. Just as he brought his wife her morning tea, I bring my wife her morning coffee. And the clock chimes downstairs.
It is a tiny clock, an old clock. But, when it chimes, it is a proud clock.
LikeLike
Joe – Thank you so much for posting this story. I only just found it after all these months. It is a lovely tribute to the clock, your parents, and both your lives. I am sorry I did not see it here sooner, but the pandemic swept me away.
I especially love this idea you wrote about: “It seemed that this little clock was keeping the family safe. There is a theory in philosophy called Panpsychism. And, according to this doctrine, everything material has some element of consciousness according to its need and that this consciousness is an essential feature of reality. This doctrine is not new. It has been around since the ancient Greek philosophers. But, now scientist philosophers are considering whether the electrons and quarks that make up all of matter also have some elements of consciousness. Perhaps, this clock was aware, within its own limits, of its purpose in life.”
LikeLike
Phil Goff’s Pansychism is an attempt to resolve the conflict between the Materialists and the Dualists. And Goff has made a good attempt by sort of claiming that consciousness — and awareness — arise from the fundamental particles we call quarks. Quarks are the end-point of matter. As we slice and dice matter into smaller and smaller chunks we get to quarks which cannot be sliced and diced any smaller and, along with electrons, are fundamental and irreducible forms of matter. Quarks comprise all forms of matter, intelligent and otherwise and come is six flavors — Up, Down, Strange, Top, Bottom and Charm. Two Up quarks and one Down quark make a proton. Two Down quarks and one Up quarks makes a neutron. Combine protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus with some electrons orbiting said nucleus and we get members of the periodic table of the elements and all of that leads to us, and every rock and tree and blade of grass. And Goff claims that within these quarks lies the true source of consciousness. To an extent he is correct but he is also incomplete.
Let us take a tangential trip to New York. We will return after a few words. New York is composed of two separate methods of public transportation — its venerable subway and the surface bus lines. And these two methods do not always intersect and these methods do not reach all neighborhoods of the city even when combined. Like the say in Maine, you can’t get there from here — only thing is they mean it. Each method is valid and each method is incomplete . So what is needed is a Unified Theory of Transportation for the city. Now, the subway system is akin to the Quantum world of physics. It runs beneath all levels of the surface. No one really knows how a person gets from one place to another. And, there are certain defined points of departure and arrival. For example, if you decide to take the Q train from Prospect Park to Coney Island it will take about 40 minutes and you will not be aware of how you got there. All you will know is that you will wind up at Stillwell Avenue. This is sort of the Quantum transportation system. If you decide to take the B68 bus, you will travel down Coney Island Avenue and the same trip will take a little over an hour but you will be able to observe your complete trip and will know exactly how you reached Neptune Avenue. This is the Macro form of transportation. There is a defined intersection of these two systems and that is when a passenger exits up the subway steps to the surface. So we know exactly the demarcation line between the Quantum and the Macro transportation systems.
However, there is no demarcation line between the quantum world of the quarks and Schrodinger and the macro world of relativity and Einstein. So just as NYC would like to have a Unified Theory of
Transportation, the world of physics would like to have a Unified Field Theory, sometimes called the Theory of Everything, because both Einstein and Schrodinger are incomplete — valid, but incomplete.
Right now, the leading theory for the Theory of Everything (TOE) is a thing called String Theory. String Theory posits that all matter is composed of tiny, one-dimensional strings of energy vibrating at very high frequencies. Some of these strings are linear and some curve back on themselves and these strings are beyond our ability to measure them since the very physics that allows us to get to this boundary prevents us from going any further. It seems that these strings of energy exist in a realm where matter, space, and time do not exist. At the Big Bang (which was not really a “bang”) there is a small fraction of time, which may not really be time, in which all that existed was energy. Once the Big Bang reached this Planck time, then matter began to form. But matter created space and time. Therefore, before the Planck time, there was no time, no matter, no space. It is within such a realm that these tiny strings of one dimensional energy exist. And, by the way, they are the basic constructs of the very quarks that make US.
Consider what it means to have no matter and no time. Matter we might be able to understand but the non-existence of time is strange concept. What that means is that there is no before or after; no yesterday, today, and tomorrow; no was or will be; no past and no future. The future is the past. Ten thousands year from now is the same as 66 millions year ago when the dinosaurs began their extinction process. An entity, or an intelligence, which exists within this realm of no-time can slide through all of eternity and observe all that happened or all that will happen, or might happen depending upon circumstances and probability and such a “sliding: will take no time because there is no time in existence. Within that realm all that exists is what I call “IS”. In other words, everything IS. The future in our macro world IS; the past in our macro world IS; and these points all exist at the same time because there is no time.
If Goff is correct and that quarks are the source of all consciousness and if String ‘theory is correct, then it is these tiny strings of energy operating in a realm absent of matter an time that is the true source of consciousness and awareness. Further, since you and I (and everyone else) have different versions of consciousness, then we also have difference versions of the collections of these tiny strings of energy because if we all had the identical set of tiny strings then we would all be the same — and we are not. We would be the same as the trees, the orangutans, the mice and cockroaches and we are not — although I have known some roaches in my time.. Having a different version of consciousness creates our individuality and in some circles we call this bounded energy field a soul, or perhaps a life force. And what this also means is that that life does not begin with physical birth nor does it end with physical death. Life IS.
If this is not true, and if only quarks provide the source of consciousness, then we get into the nature v. nurture messy businesses. A quark is a quark is a quark so how can the sameness produce different outcomes. Then nurture must be the game and nature be damned. And what Goff proposes is immaterial. The Materialists win.
LikeLike