Keeping Time

a true story with a happy ending



This clock belonged to my maternal grandparents, John and Anna Kruse. They lived in the area just southeast of St. Louis, across the Mississippi River in Illinois. Married in October of 1914, they farmed the fertile Illinois land and raised six children, five sons and a daughter. The youngest child, Anita, is my mother. Anna passed away when my mother was in her early teens. When her father passed away in 1959, my mother inherited this clock. She brought it back to Kansas City where we were living at the time. Over the years, my family moved to the Chicago suburbs, and later, when my dad retired, my parents relocated to central Florida. John’s and Anna’s clock moved along with them.

Time passes ... In the summer of 1997, my daughter (also Anna) and I took a meandering road trip down to Florida to visit my parents. During our visit, my mom asked if I would like to have her family clock. I was very pleased to have a physical connection to the grandfather I remembered fondly and the grandmother I had never known, and so the clock came back to Boone County, Missouri with me. When she gave me the clock, Mom said she thought it might need repairing, she didn’t know for sure. Over the years, I’d intended to find someone reliable to take a look at it. Time slipped by though, and I never got around to seeing if it could be repaired.

Now some more years roll by, until it is last month, August of 2009. After vacationing with my sisters in Massachusetts, my mother journeyed back to her hometown in Illinois for a short visit with family and friends. Since she was in our neck-of-the-woods, (relatively speaking) my husband and I drove to Waterloo to spend a couple of days with her. One afternoon we all visited my mother’s brother, Hubert, who lives with his son Hubie and daughter-in-law, Karen. It was a pleasant afternoon, catching up on one another’s activities and listening to my mother and uncle reminisce about their childhood on the farm.

One thing about my cousin's and uncle's home that is impossible not to notice is the extraordinary number of clocks in every room - clocks of many styles and shapes, all ticking and some occasionally chiming. In the past few years, my cousin Hubie has developed a passion for collecting old clocks, and has become very knowledgeable about fixing them. One thing led to another, and when we left that evening, we’d arranged to mail the family clock to Hubie to see if it could be fixed. Within a few days of receiving it, my cousin emailed that he’d adjusted and oiled the clock - and that it was running like a champ. He wondered if I’d like my uncle to refinish the wooden clock case. I remembered seeing all the beautiful old pieces of furniture my uncle had refinished in their home and said yes.

I was so excited to learn that my clock was working and looked forward to its return, especially after Hubie emailed a photo of it, resplendent in its finished state. In the meantime I asked my mother what she knew about the clock and when it had stopped working. She doesn’t know how long her parents had the clock, possibly it was a wedding gift. She did remember that the last time it was keeping time was in April of 1943 when her mother passed away. Imagine! The old clock had stopped working sixty-six years ago. World War ll was being fought, FDR was president, and people gathered around their radio sets to hear the news of the day. Now, like Rip Van Winkle, the clock has awakened in the twenty-first century, where people wear digital wristwatches run by tiny batteries and we hear about current events nearly instantaneously via the internet.



Last week the clock arrived in the mail, safe and sound. Not only does it keep time, it is stunning in its new transfiguration. My uncle removed the dark stain and gave it a lighter warm finish that shows off the beautiful grain of the wood. Now it sits on a shelf in our living room where we can see it from all directions. It has a quiet but distinct “tic toc”. Its chime is rich, mellow and soft. In the evenings its sounds make a perfect soothing background accompaniment to reading and knitting. I’m still musing on its history and thinking about how coincidental yet fitting it is that members of our Kruse clan gave it a second life.

I don’t know... Perhaps it’s the English major in me, always looking for a story. A newspaper clipping or postcard tucked in the pages of a library book, old black and white photographs of stern-looking families strewn on the counter of a flea market mall ... these fragments can set me pondering and speculating. What’s the story here? So now, as I knit or spin, I look up at Anna’s and John’s clock ticking so placidly, and my imagination stirs. What family vignettes did the old clock witness as it quietly marked time and the children grew? And also, why did the clock stop running after Anna’s death? Was she the one who faithfully kept the clock wound? Or perhaps, with the loss of this farm family’s homemaker, with so much to be done and several sons in the armed services, there simply wasn’t time to bother with the clock.

I don’t expect I’ll ever know the answers to any of my musings. But one thing I do know. The blood that flowed through the hands of that earlier clock-winder also flows through my hands as I take on this task. I look down at the little clock key in my hand and then up at the clock’s face. In the reflection of the glass cover, I see my family smiling back at me.






Dedicated to my mother and grandparents.