THE TICKING OF TIME

I have a small bedside travel alarm that ever so softly goes tick, tick, tick, tick. Each tick soft and distinct and separated by a slight pause. On the far side of the room there hangs an eight day coo coo clock. It cannot go a whole eight days because the ceiling is not high enough for the weights to be able to drop eight days worth. But that's okay, it goes for five days before I need to pull up the weights. This clock generally goes TOCK, TICK. I know this sounds strange and I have concentrated on hearing TICK, TOCK but it just isn't. It is a very definite TOCK, TICK.

In the wee smalls of this morning, however, when I awakened to a quiet, restful peace, and lay awake listening for the hour to strike, there was a different rhythm. Now, my sister has a coo coo that is only a twelve hour coo coo. The tick of this coo coo sounds to me as a frantic ticktickticktickticktick with no pauses in between at all. The grandfather clock at my sisters keeps time with a rich and regal TICK pause TOCK pause TICK pause TOCK etc. This aside is to illustrate that I am well aware of a lot of different ticking sounds and rhythms.

So in this morning's wee smalls as I listened, I heard -- TICKity, TOCK, TICKity, TOCK, TICKity, TOCK. Very strange. I listened for quite a while and it did not change. Four o'clock came and went as did the half hour, and then five. I decided that I had been in bed for long enough and just got up, showered, had oatmeal and coffee and am on with my day.

Any why does all this ticking seem important to me today? Could be because it is my seventy second birthday and I am all too aware of the ticking of time. Which, by the way, seems to be passing me by faster and faster all the time.

AND -- Advent begins tomorrow. Didn't we just do that? Obviously not. And so .... on into Advent ...