I have the clock still. It is on the shelf in my sitting room, and it runs well, and it stops when it stops, and I have learned to treat the stops the way my grandmother must have learned to treat them — not with fear and not with absolute reliance, but with attention.
Wait before you move.
The log is in its second year. I do not always understand an entry at the time I write it. I sometimes understand it three weeks later, or three months later, when I can look back and see what I would have done in the three minutes the clock was still.
What the clock does is not something I can explain in mechanical terms, which Mr. Stahl established over twenty years and three inspections. What it does in practical terms is interrupt. It inserts three minutes of pause into a moment I would otherwise have moved through without stopping.
Most of the time, if I think about it afterward, the pause is the thing that mattered. The three minutes in which the momentum of the decision broke and I had room to notice something I would otherwise have missed.
My grandmother kept this clock for forty years. She learned what it was over years of paying attention. She did not will it to her children. She willed it to me.
I am thirty-one. I have two years of the log. I have forty years ahead of me, if I am fortunate, to understand it properly.
There is a shelf above my fireplace where the clock lives, and there is something satisfying about knowing it will outlast me in the way it outlasted her, and will find its way eventually to someone who will sit in front of it on a February afternoon and notice it has stopped, and wonder.
I hope they write it down.
I hope they wait before they move.
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