Imagine a jungle environment in the high summer heat.  The humidity is 100% and it is not raining out.  Our family of six arrives to visit their grandparents.  They are true Floridians, a bit chilly and sweater clad in the jungle.

The kids have worn themselves out in the pool.  They fall asleep despite the heat.  We are out on a pull out sofa bed with a bar of steel that breaks our backs.  We, too, eventually fall asleep.  We are scantily clad, not naked.  The thermostat reading I had taken showed 95 degrees at eleven p.m. with no air conditioning.

At midnight a cuckoo clock started the time symphony.  The dusty little bird cheerfully came out and chimed “CUCKOO” twelve times.  Another mantel clock wheezed into action and chimed a throaty twelve times. I was awake and sweating.  The grandfather clock did an impressive Big Ben rendition announcing twelve “Bong, Bong, Bong, Bong, Bong, Bong, Bong, Bong, Bong, Bong, BONG, BONG” loud enough to wake the dead.

Each clock had been set so that when one was sounding off its last note, another would begin its rendition of the time.  I sat up in bed and whispered, “What the f–k?” to my husband. I went into the bathroom to  use the facility and ran water in the sink until it got cool.  This took an inordinate amount of time.  I let the tepid water run over my wrists to cool my blood. It did not work.  I checked on the kids.  They were in a back bedroom away from the majestic clocks.  We were in the room where all the clocks were arranged.

I lay half asleep and half awake in the torpid heat.  I waited for the clocks to chime the hours off.  I felt a deep sense of mortality.  The clocks, to me, reminded me of the passage of time on the planet.

We scooted back to our northern climate after the visit.  The office had taken a collection to give my husband a gift after years of service as a C.E.O.  It was a clock!  He brought it home and he turned a key to wind it up and set the time.  It chimed the Big Ben imperious notes.  I let it go for a week.  I stopped the clock’s pendulum.  I felt victory!  T.S. Eliot had one line of verse that I understand now.  “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”  I agree.  I’ll take coffee spoons over chiming clocks any day.