My clock-radio was dead. I was adrift.
So many of my childhood memories are of things that came to us free. The clock-radio had been old before it arrived on my sidetable. It may have come from the local dump, or been salvaged from one of Dad’s job sites, or been dropped off by Grandma. I didn’t know or care. I’d claimed it the instant it appeared. It was massive, with the clunky buttons and wood paneling of a Vietnam Era station wagon and an alarm that evoked Soviet invasions. I cleaned it meticulously, memorized each button, coaxed new tricks out of the thing like an old bear rescued from a circus. I invented reasons to get up early, even though I was a homeschooler in the woods with places to be only on holidays. I found a couple radio stations that trickled through the mountains, and I determined that these my favorite music, although I invariably woke to commercials anyway. I may have been born before smartphones and Nintendos, but I instinctively seized this thread of my destiny with the violence of a castaway spying a plane.
Then it died.
I couldn’t do anything to coax life from it. I finally even removed its case, slowly, sheepishly, like helping an elderly parent to the bathroom for the first time, but despite my collections of circuit boards (still smelling faintly of the dump from which I collected them) I actually had no idea what to do after that. The thing sat by my bed, day after day, massive, silent, hurtful.
One day my mom put us all in the van. We played on the floor of the giant Econoline while she did grownup things in the department store. She was in there even longer than normal. When she came back out, instead of bed sheets or underwear or toilet paper, she had only a small box. She was smiling like she had wrested it from a dragon in its lair, and we were all lining the windows in silence before she even reached us. She got in and handed me the box.
I don’t remember her exact words. I do remember her smile, the triumph. She had gone looking for clock-radios. At first they were too expensive, but she’d kept hunting with the persistence of a woman who could grow humans in the woods. And she had found one! The whole time that she was talking, my sisters were looking at me and the box with something like awe. One did not receive such special dispensations in a large family, not without the benefit of disease or birthday.
Finally, it was time for me to ruin everything.
While my sisters were dwelling on the human interest aspects of the story, or perhaps what they might get to even the balances, I’d been reading and re-reading the back of the box, all shiny and bullet-pointed. Next I’d studied the picture on the front over and over: so much smaller, sleeker, prouder than the old bear corpse in my bedroom! And there was a reason.
“Mom, this is just a clock.”
“What!”
I remember this part vividly somehow, the piece of the story that wasn’t mine: browsing past the clock-radios, drifting from the land of magic, wandering unwittingly into the mundane, the plain old appliances. Eyes alighting on price tags that finally aligned with what she had in her purse, rekindled hope. Excitement brimming as she returned to the van, eyes on my face.
“It’s perfect, Mom,” I said, too young to know why.
“Really?”
“It’s just what I want.”
She hadn’t believed me, of course. She hadn’t returned the traitorous box and reclaimed her grocery money because she was exhausted, maybe embarrassed, maybe behind on supper. My white lie had been unnecessary, even condescending. I’d replaced my magical circus bear with a dumb monument to clumsy deception.
If I still had that thing now, it would be even more ancient than the old bear had been. Its buttons would be crushed flat, the cheap gold surface worn off by a million touches, its bleeting tinny and prehistoric and hilarious next to my iPhone’s morning aural massage. It would have woken me over 10,000 times, through the cold welcome of high school, the terror of college, the numbing siege of law school. It would have been the harsh reminder of a hundred predawn flights to catch, the red glare over hundreds of overdue projects, the nagging that ended thousands of too-late nights. I would not be able to look at without remembering misspent grocery money and Mom’s falling face. It would be the only thing I have owned for thirty years straight.
I love it with all my heart.
