THE CLOCK WITHOUT A BACK-STORY
One day last fall, I was in my car, waiting at a stoplight, when a clock began to chime in the trunk of my Corolla. It chimed four or five times and then stopped. A few minutes later, after arriving at my home, I investigated. When I opened the trunk I found about eight or nine grocery sacks partially filled with old books. Nothing unusual about that. I am constantly culling books from my shelves in order to make room for new arrivals. Once every two or three months, I will fill a few grocery bags with books and try to peddle them to various local used-book dealers. But times are hard in the book-selling business, and these days most used-book stores are not buying as many books as they once did. Lately, whenever I attempt to peddle a selection of books, I generally find buyers for only about half of them. Those that go unsold usually remain in the trunk of my car because I am loath to bring them back into the house and try to find space for them on my already overburdened shelves. Thus, at any given time, five to ten partially filled bags of books can be found in the trunk of my car. I shudder to think what this excess weight has done to my gas mileage.
On the day I heard the clock chiming, I opened the trunk and saw nothing but bags of books. I removed these one by one only to discover that a battered cardboard box was lying in the darkness behind them. Inside the box was a 100-year-old wooden clock in a sad state of repair. Upon seeing the clock, I realized that I must have placed it there when Julie and I were moving from Placerville to Sacramento five and a half years earlier. The clock had been with us during our entire nine-year stay in Placerville. And before that, it had been with us in the house we rented in Auburn for seven years. At some point during the Placerville years the clock had been broken (probably by an overly active cat) and we had shoved it into the back of a closet. No doubt, we intended to have it repaired but simply forgot to do so. Thus, when we arrived in Sacramento, neither Julie nor I noticed that the clock never managed to make it into the house. Instead it got lost for nearly six years in the trunk of my car. Its sorry condition was no doubt worsened during those years. Every bump in the road probably contributed to its decrepitude. The heat of summer no doubt broiled it, and the chill of winter must have nipped at its face and caused painful contractions to its wooden case. No wonder, then, that the clock finally mustered the strength to emit a cry for help as I waited at a quiet intersection for the light to turn green.
This happened last October, a week or two before our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. It occurred to me that I could have the clock repaired and present it to Julie as an anniversary gift. I took it to a clock-repair shop on Freeport Boulevard. The repairman wanted $400 to fix it. I lifted up the box and prepared to leave. “I’ll do it for $300,” the repairman said.
“One hundred dollars,” I countered.
“Two hundred dollars out the door – that includes the tax,” said the repairman.
A deal was struck. I left the clock at the repair shop and drove home. I did some investigating on the internet and discovered that 100-year-old Sessions clocks identical to mine but in perfect running condition could be purchased for about $100. In other words, I could have purchased two clocks identical to mine on eBay for what I was paying to have mine repaired.
One of the things Julie and I like about antiques is that they come with stories. With a single exception, Julie and I can recite the circumstances of every antique purchase we’ve ever made – where we bought the item in question, roughly what we paid for it, any difficulties involved in getting it home, etc. What’s more, a lot of our antiques have back-stories, tales about their histories that were passed on to us by the dealers who sold them to us. In our living room there hangs an oil painting that was copied from a famous painting by Gustav Klimt titled Die Musik (Music). Ours is not a forgery. It was never intended to fool anyone into thinking it was the original. It reproduces less than one half of Klimt’s original. According to the dealer we bought it from it was painted by a German art student in the 1950s who was standing in front of the original as he painted. A lot of European art galleries allow serious art students to set up easels in front of great paintings and make copies of some portion of the original as an exercise in craft. The anonymous artists who painted our copy of Die Musik focused his attention on only the left side of Klimt’s original, which is dominated by a young female lute player who strums her instrument as a stone gargoyle looks on from behind her. An art expert would no doubt dismiss it as a third-rate hack job. But I think the copy demonstrates a true reverence for Klimt’s work. The copyist appears to have fallen in love with the lute player as he painted her, for he rendered her with a bit more detail than Klimt did, enhancing her fragile beauty. An expert would say that Klimt intended the figure as an allegory for music itself and not as a realistic depiction of physical human beauty. Fair enough. But when I look at our painting (which was also purchased as an anniversary present for Julie), I see more than just a copy of a famous Klimt. I see a young German student in a Munich art gallery of the 1950s, standing in front of Klimt’s original for hours on end and gradually falling in love with its wistful-looking allegorical figure, perhaps without even knowing it himself. That story makes the painting worth more than the few hundred dollars I paid for it (although, sadly, it doesn’t make it worth the $30 million I could get for it on the open market if it were an original Klimt).
Alas, the wooden clock from the trunk of my car is the one antique in our house that has no back-story. I was hoping that, after having the clock repaired and presenting it to Julie as an anniversary present, she would be able to recall the story of how and where we acquired the clock. Strangely, neither of us can remember where it came from. We are both certain that we had the clock when we lived in Auburn, but whether we bought it while living in Auburn or at some earlier point in time, neither of us can say. Its back-story – i.e., anything we might have learned about it from the dealer who sold it to us – is gone. But thanks to the unusual circumstances in which it somewhat miraculously reappeared in our lives, it now has an interesting front story. I heard it gonging in the trunk of my car. I dug it out from behind a wall of unsaleable old books. I took it to a repair shop where I paid twice its resale value to have it repaired. On the day of our anniversary, I set the clock on the mantelpiece and waited for Julie to come home and discover it for herself. At a quarter to six on the night of our anniversary, Julie arrived home and walked right through the living room without noticing the clock, despite the fact that it was tick-tocking quite audibly in a room that had never before housed a ticking clock. She went to the bedroom and changed out of her work clothes. Then she passed through the living room again to check her email in our home office. Not until fifteen minutes after her arrival, when the clock chimed six times, did Julie finally notice the addition to our living room décor. And only gradually did she recognize that the clock was an old friend rather than a new one. A few minutes later, we sat down to dinner and I told her the story of how I had rediscovered the clock. After that we spent a good half hour trying to recall where we had gotten the clock in the first place. That was four months ago. The clock has been ticking and chiming every day since without managing to trigger a recollection of how or where we acquired it. It is a clock with no back-story whatsoever. But if it had remained in the trunk of my car much longer, it might have been beyond restoration, in which case it would have had no front story either. I guess we should be grateful that it has any story at all.