The Clock That Stopped!

Easing my seventy five year old weary frame into the armchair, I looked up the clock expectedly, "Damn thing never moves fast enough!". Retirement is playing tricks with my faculty related to time. While I was working it was the reverse...clocks running like sprinters consuming time rapidly. Impatiently I pick up a dog eared magazine for the hundredth time.

 

As I thought of her and her memories flooded the recesses of my brain. It was always me who waited looking at my watch. The way she acts in that affectionate yet jauntily careless manner when she catches me at that, her laughter lightening up the darkest of my moments? Back in those days I usually used to read up a joke or cook up an anecdote, just to make her laugh or make her listen to me while taking me in those round, saucer like eyes. I felt I could go on forever just looking into them all through my life.

Was it love or mere attraction? Usually, we convince ourselves in the later part of our lives about our flings of teenage as the most profound love stories history has witnessed. Nostalgia assists this feeling to a large extent. But that chemistry between us, ugh..I never did like chemistry, physics would have been a better turn of phrase.. was there to be seen by everybody. Always eyes darting to catch sight of the other, any action anticipating a reaction from THE one, suddenly I got tears in my eyes. That age, those antics...well, there I go again that loop of nostalgia. 

Again I looked at the old "tick-tocker". One gets used to looking at clocks at this age, with only resigned anticipation of events. She always mocked at me, "People would think of you as a clockophile, the way you stare at them!" Yet I never looked at them when we were together. But somehow it was like an obsession..not tolerating its awareness slipping beneath the consciousness... time..it is fleeing. 

Marriage only increased the attraction between us. We thought of the other as indispensable as the air we breathe in. Then time flew by without even attracting the barest of the notices one gives to the events that come to later known as life. Career swings, kids, transfers...everything was tolerable as long as we were together. Age brought wrinkles, baldness, paunch, spectacles but did not lessen the increasing affinity...love. I did not know what would happen to me without her. Those thoughts were unbearable.

 

Then I look up at the clock again. This time an exasperated voice from behind me woke me up from my concentrated addiction, "How many times would you look at it, Grandpa? I don't know what comes over these oldies! Where are you so impatient to go?". My teenage granddaughter was walking down the corridor to her room along with her friend.

How do I tell her where I wanted to go. I wanted to go to her. I remembered those eyes again, sparkling brightly before permanently closing down on me. I could see the invitation. Her death....I always wanted that to be our death.....That was five years ago.

Down the corridor I could hear the kid explaining to her friend about the weird old spectacle in the hall, "He is slightly..you know...after my grandma's demise. We tried to console him. And you know what? That clock stopped running years ago!"

I smile despondently. What do these kids know? When I am with her I would not look at the clock again.

Again, I looked at the clock.