Speaker 1: It started with rain, and not the grand operatic sort
Speaker 1: of deluge from classic novels, but the quietly thorough drizzle
Speaker 1: of early spring, seeping patiently through the day, tickling window
Speaker 1: ledges and swelling the river. It was a Thursday, the
Speaker 1: kind you don't just remember, but registering, mussel and fok,
Speaker 1: a day designed for libraries. I'd been coming here most
Speaker 1: afternoons since my so called early retirement, a phrase I
Speaker 1: could barely say without smirking or wincing, depending on the weather.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it felt like a reward, sometimes like a sentence.
Speaker 1: Time to fill unshape. In a town that moves slower
Speaker 1: outside the school calendar, the library was a red bricks
Speaker 1: bowl by the water. It expanded of regenerations and sections
Speaker 1: that never quite matched. My favorite spot on afternoons like
Speaker 1: these was the Periodical's room, sunken chamber tucked behind the
Speaker 1: reference desk, all low ceilings and lamps that hummed lazily
Speaker 1: over batted arm chairs. It always smelled faintly of wet
Speaker 1: coats and old newsprint. I had settled in my usual
Speaker 1: coroner across wood book sprawled across the urm of a
Speaker 1: feder wingback when my eyes landed on the grand for
Speaker 1: the clock lie woman by the far wall, intricate baroque,
Speaker 1: leaning ever so slightly, its carved flourishes reaching for the
Speaker 1: cracked ceiling as if seeking favor. I'd seen it every visit,
Speaker 1: but I'd never really watched it until that day. Something
Speaker 1: about it to pendulum steady or cut through the room's hush.
Speaker 1: It should have been two thirty seven p m. My
Speaker 1: wristworts said as much as did the flickering wall clock
Speaker 1: ab of the catalog compute as a cheap piece of
Speaker 1: plastic with a drooping minute hand. But the Grandfather clockery
Speaker 1: two twenty three, his polished brass face was luminous in
Speaker 1: the pale light. The difference pressed on me at first,
Speaker 1: just a bit of trivia, hardly worth mentioning. Still, A
Speaker 1: double checked my phone two thirty seven, with the usual
Speaker 1: cluster of little icons in a reminder to pick up
Speaker 1: calf food. I looked around. The periodical's room wasn't empty.
Speaker 1: An older men, mister Daily, always buried in local headlines,
Speaker 1: flipped a newspaper with mild authority. A pair of college
Speaker 1: students puzzled over an atlas, and in the middle, near
Speaker 1: the window, a young man in a blue sweater sat
Speaker 1: with an unread magazine and a mug of tea, eyes
Speaker 1: often strained to the Grandfather clock, the auto thing. When
Speaker 1: the clock chimed one of those melodies slightly wrong old
Speaker 1: Westminster sequences, the young man stood gathering his things as
Speaker 1: though on key. No one seemed surprised. He left his
Speaker 1: chair and coat perfectly arranged, as if another self would
Speaker 1: simply trade places. In a few minutes. On impulse, I arose,
Speaker 1: crossing to the desk. Missus Krmier, the head librarian, was
Speaker 1: re arranging the book return. Her hair perfectly silver. Her
Speaker 1: glasses are a beaded chain. I have never managed idle
Speaker 1: chatting with her. She was the rare sword whose gays
Speaker 1: held both perennial memory and bright practical impatience. Missus Cormier,
Speaker 1: I began trying to sound half amuse. Has the Grandfather
Speaker 1: clock always been as far off? She didn't even look
Speaker 1: up well that clock. Her face creased with the beginning
Speaker 1: of a smile. Always been odd. Dear older than the
Speaker 1: libraryes are probably older than this wing. We try resetting it,
Speaker 1: but it always drifts drift. I asked, as if i'd
Speaker 1: call her in some gentle exaggeration. We've had people and
Speaker 1: clockmaker's hobbyists the whole parade set it right, and in
Speaker 1: a few weeks it's off again. Sometimes it jumps forward
Speaker 1: over night, she shrugged. It's part of the building's rhythm.
Speaker 1: I supposed I should have been satisfied, another quirk of
Speaker 1: old institutions. And yet as I returned to my seat,
Speaker 1: the crosswood seemed curiously flat. I watched as a patron
Speaker 1: who looked to be packing up to leave and stair
Speaker 1: drafted back to his chair, glancing at the ground for
Speaker 1: the clock before flipping to his mark section. A sense
Speaker 1: of locy choreography wove the room together, barily perceptible. I
Speaker 1: scribbled the time discrepancy in the corner of my cross
Speaker 1: wood brook, half marking my own curiosity. When I looked
Speaker 1: up because a movement in the window caught my eye,
Speaker 1: I realized the young man of the mug was still seated,
Speaker 1: exactly as before. For a moment I actually doubted he'd
Speaker 1: ever left. The rain intensified, rattling across the glass. I
Speaker 1: settled in feeding questions bloom quietly like mushrooms. After midnight.
Speaker 1: I didn't know which clock governed the room or white mattered.
Speaker 1: But from that moment I washed hunt time began to
Speaker 1: feel stranger by the hour. The library, in its way,
Speaker 1: gave a tel for over to oddity. I had long
Speaker 1: thought so, even before the day with the grandfather clock.
Speaker 1: It was built in rumor and and brick, by committee
Speaker 1: and catastrophe. The oldest wing had been at church, gutted
Speaker 1: by the fire of eleven a date everyone recite it,
Speaker 1: though my great uncle swore the blaze was in spring
Speaker 1: of the next year. They were built along the river side,
Speaker 1: salvaging walls and pews, then and extrooms and corridors for
Speaker 1: each generation's need. A b urban reading room for town matrons,
Speaker 1: a tero chav wall with geniogies, children's rooms full of
Speaker 1: animal murals, and my haven, the periodical's room, sunken and peculiar.
Speaker 1: Stepping from room to room, you learned to navigate a
Speaker 1: topography of creaking floorboards and mismatched lamp sheets. The periodical's
Speaker 1: room was specially eccentric, lined with encyclopedias. Nobody checked out
Speaker 1: any more. Plump chao salvage from the oak's lodge. An
Speaker 1: ancient umbrella stands never quite empty. A long one moll Harn,
Speaker 1: a series of hand lettered plaques, cracked wooden slats painted
Speaker 1: with peculiar twantyne zones, A rio of time a river
Speaker 1: town meantime found his tin meat attached to a tiny clock,
Speaker 1: almost all of which ticked at different paces or stood
Speaker 1: permanently at ten past three. History built sideways, mister Daley
Speaker 1: always said, especially in river towns. He told me this
Speaker 1: one rainy afternoon, as he unfolded his broad sheet in
Speaker 1: the periodical's room, always in the same patch of yellow lamplight.
Speaker 1: He never or fail to comment on headlines. They bury
Speaker 1: things here, then dig up only what its neighborly. My
Speaker 1: own habitat over months edged toward ritual I derived near
Speaker 1: one in the afternoon, walk the outer stacks, reading spines
Speaker 1: as one might read local gravesunds, then settle into the
Speaker 1: periodical's room. The cross Widower was my small act of
Speaker 1: faith for a puzzle a day, followed by non fiction
Speaker 1: or history, sometimes volunteering with for shelving, sometimes swapping gossip
Speaker 1: about the city's warbliss buses. The periodical's room belonged to
Speaker 1: a steady caste, Missus Cormier, always at her post answered
Speaker 1: reference questions with one eye on the clock. Not the Grandfather,
Speaker 1: mind you. The digital on her desk, raphael A precise
Speaker 1: teen harvested books from the quiet study next each afternoon,
Speaker 1: stacking them by subject, alphabet, and color. A system no
Speaker 1: card catalog recognized. Students from the college drifted through in clusters,
Speaker 1: haunted by looming deadlines, high on coffee, in low on quiet.
Speaker 1: The Grandfather clock, though tallest, was almost easy to ignore
Speaker 1: until you tried not to. Its face was a labyrinth
Speaker 1: Roman numerals, shot through with minute hand carved lily petals,
Speaker 1: the kind that flared in town gardens every July. It
Speaker 1: takes so softly you'd have to kneel beside it to
Speaker 1: hear its heartbeat. Its pendulum slightly clouded with age, swan
Speaker 1: with authority. It didn't match the decor or the decade.
Speaker 1: Some one, at some point had screwed a brass plaqued
Speaker 1: below it, gifted to Riverside Library ere known. I sat
Speaker 1: opposite the thing for days before noticing the way people
Speaker 1: moved in its orbit. Some drifted over near the hour,
Speaker 1: as if to check their bearings. Others, buried in their
Speaker 1: routines seemed to register the clock's time without a visible glance,
Speaker 1: gathering coats or treating out magazines around the half hour mark.
Speaker 1: Raphael the sharp eyed, in turn, once paused as he
Speaker 1: reached for a volume, absent mindedly setting a stack down
Speaker 1: beside the clock before resuming his work. I remarked on it,
Speaker 1: joking that the clock was magnetic. He looked blank, then smiled,
Speaker 1: like someone trying to recall a half remember dream. Another day,
Speaker 1: as the rain slackened and sunlight burn through the southern windows,
Speaker 1: I noticed one detail I'd missed before. The wall beneath
Speaker 1: the plaques always seemed to hold a faint shill, as
Speaker 1: if he did air bent to the clock's needs. One Thursday,
Speaker 1: at five minutes passed three according to the gold room
Speaker 1: wall clock, I saw a ragged handful of regulars gather
Speaker 1: near the Grandfather, exchanging nods with the sort of seriousness
Speaker 1: reserved for real occasions. It wasn't the librarian led program,
Speaker 1: nor some scheduled event, and yet everyone lingered until the
Speaker 1: clocks solemnly mark three zero. Almost on cue. Chairs were shifted,
Speaker 1: reading pile swapped, whole tables reorganized, some left drifting away.
Speaker 1: Others found these seats as if the chimes shuffled their rhythms,
Speaker 1: no announcement, no bell, but the grandfather's. I looked at
Speaker 1: my watch, then the wall clock, then the grandfather. Nor
Speaker 1: to agree, not even within the same ten minutes span.
Speaker 1: And yet in this room the wall pivoted on the
Speaker 1: old clock's pendulum, and it felt less like herror than invitation.
Speaker 1: That night, as I left, Rafael glanced up from his
Speaker 1: stack of battered biographies. Good night Evelyn, periodical's closing routine.
Speaker 1: A quarter passed, Just so you know, quarter past what,
Speaker 1: I asked, half joking, gesturing at the wall of orphan clocks.
Speaker 1: He grinned, but the answer was obvious, Quarter past, Grandfather.
Speaker 1: I went home less certain of time's work than when
Speaker 1: I arrived, but I slept more soundly for it. It
Speaker 1: didn't take long for curiosity to demand immorses stomatic approach.
Speaker 1: On a slate gray Wednesday, with bustle muted by drizzle,
Speaker 1: I arrived at the periodical's room clutching a solution, my
Speaker 1: trusty digital travel clock, a black plastic square with an
Speaker 1: eager backut face. I said it on the end table
Speaker 1: beside the grandfather, boots barely dried from puddles every half hour,
Speaker 1: I checked the old clock, the digital, my wristwatch, and
Speaker 1: my phone. I charted this bread in my crosswood book
Speaker 1: page margins pulsham of messy numerals and arrows. The Grandfather
Speaker 1: consistently lagged, at first by twelve minutes, then at the
Speaker 1: next interval only seven. I caught it skipping ahead by
Speaker 1: three minutes, in the time it took to finish two
Speaker 1: pages of the local news. At first, I suspected mechanical instability,
Speaker 1: warped gears, loose weights, moody springs, but the pattern was
Speaker 1: often ways I couldn't account for by engineering. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: Grandfather's hand surged forward a burst, then drifted back, as
Speaker 1: though chasing or teasing the digital's relentless march. Other times
Speaker 1: the old clock scene content to drift in its own
Speaker 1: mild orbit. That afternoon, something else snagged my eye. The
Speaker 1: book group, mostly old skuld teachers and local gene allergies,
Speaker 1: had claimed the window table. Passing around the stack of
Speaker 1: yellow clippings. They were deep in debate about the Great
Speaker 1: Flood of nineteen sixty six, each insisting on different dates
Speaker 1: and details. No, No, The Levey broke the weekend before
Speaker 1: Easter one insisted that would have made it April seventeenth
Speaker 1: clear as day. Another membrane, says Griggs always precise corrected,
Speaker 1: it was a Wednesday. Surely Easter was late that year.
Speaker 1: I craned over the table and on impulse checked one
Speaker 1: of the old newspapers they were referencing. The mast had
Speaker 1: read April seventeenth, nineteen sixty six, Wednesday. My head spun
Speaker 1: a little because I was certain, absolutely certain, that April seventeenth,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six was a Sunday. This I knew from
Speaker 1: my father's old church bulletins, which she never threw out.
Speaker 1: Maybe these are old, miss Prince, I said aloud, not
Speaker 1: sure whether I was speaking to myself or to the
Speaker 1: women still lost in dates and debate. Missus Cormier, shoving
Speaker 1: an armful of atlases near by, overheard and called out
Speaker 1: her cheerful shout down the aisle as a fielding a
Speaker 1: question she'd gotten every week for a decade. Our arcaves
Speaker 1: were generous with Miss Prince, she said, smiling aes twinkling.
Speaker 1: Something in her tone made me th think it wasn't
Speaker 1: just about errors. It was about archives being quirky, alive,
Speaker 1: prone to their own logic. I put the newspaper aside,
Speaker 1: but a knew wich settled in. Was the grand father
Speaker 1: Cock's time contagious? Did the periodical's room warp small histories?
Speaker 1: Everyone seemed to treat the Grandfather's hours news with thee
Speaker 1: more than a matter of punctuality. The way mister Daley
Speaker 1: would rise and leave with the clock'spell, or the book
Speaker 1: group would reference dates that didn't exist to none of
Speaker 1: it felt entirely accidental. By closing, I had a new
Speaker 1: entry in my crossword book, Why do dates get weird?
Speaker 1: In here? Underneath a cruise sketch of the Grandfather Clock,
Speaker 1: more shadow than brass, Its hands pointed to no obvious
Speaker 1: hour That evening at home, I come through a photo
Speaker 1: of last year's Easter sunrise service April seventeenth had indeed
Speaker 1: been a Sunday, not a Wednesday. The contradiction, grany and refutable,
Speaker 1: unmoored something in me. What was this room's relationship to
Speaker 1: the rest of the world. Why did its errors cling
Speaker 1: so persistently? The next morning, I arrived early, determined to
Speaker 1: map the gap between the Grandfather and the Reel. My
Speaker 1: plan was methodical, visit at three different times, check evy
Speaker 1: of its leable clock and jock cross comparisons. I started
Speaker 1: at nine, too, digital in hand. The periodical's grandfather welcomed
Speaker 1: me with eight forty seven. At noon, the interval had trunk.
Speaker 1: The clock now read eleven fifty eight. I watched Miss
Speaker 1: Escormier set up the day's book, displayed humming along with
Speaker 1: the radio. Her timing mashed the ground for the clock,
Speaker 1: not her phone. Twenty minutes later, Rafael swept in arms
Speaker 1: full of Rotun's calling at cheery morning that match neither
Speaker 1: my watch nor the grand father's reading. I wandered into
Speaker 1: the reference room. No time crooks there. The computer clock,
Speaker 1: the staff area wall clock, my phone, perfect agreement. The
Speaker 1: oddity belonged stubbornly to the periodical's room. After lunch, the
Speaker 1: rain abated sun shot through the high windows. I sat
Speaker 1: with a tabloid and waired, watching regulars drift in each hour.
Speaker 1: The grandfather's hand seemed to hesitate, sometimes rushing to catch up.
Speaker 1: There was no visible recalibration, no staff winding the movement,
Speaker 1: no patrons fussing with keys. It acted as if it
Speaker 1: were being subtly directed by something in the room, or
Speaker 1: by the room itself. More peculiar. Still, a few people
Speaker 1: in the peer per articles were and followed the ground
Speaker 1: for the clock's lead with a trust I could not explain.
Speaker 1: At half past two, students gathered their bags, glanced at
Speaker 1: each other, and headed together to the vending machine. When
Speaker 1: I checked the wall, clock said two forty three, a
Speaker 1: grandfather two thirty sharp. The pattern repeated itself out by
Speaker 1: our generler than routine, resistant to any device I could brain.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just time that drifted, either. Conversation had its
Speaker 1: own shape, bending toward half forgotten anniversaries and local events that,
Speaker 1: when quietly fact checked, refused to align with the world
Speaker 1: outside to grand for this sphere. Mister Daily, trading trivia
Speaker 1: with me, recounted the ground breaking for the River Sides
Speaker 1: Civic Center's September nineteen fifty two. Too hot for laborers,
Speaker 1: so they opened the foundation at sunset. I remembered it otherwise,
Speaker 1: growing up at seen the town parade for its opening
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight. Daily was adamant, even producing a
Speaker 1: battered flyer Riverside Civic Center inaugural ceremony September fourteen, nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two. My friend Ruth, a former city clerk, once
Speaker 1: told me memory is a weather pattern, don't expect it
Speaker 1: to obey maps. That afternoon, the sense of double reality
Speaker 1: grew sur potent that I did what I'd never done before.
Speaker 1: I borrowed one of the yellow paged magazines from the
Speaker 1: periodical's room and found its reference copy in the reference
Speaker 1: room next door. The issue should have been identical October
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four, but the Periodical's rooms edition bore a
Speaker 1: mass out of October thirty two, nineteen eighty four, and
Speaker 1: its editors led a referenced events I was sure happened
Speaker 1: the following year. The reference room copy followed the standard calendar,
Speaker 1: plain as day. Raphaeled every resourceful in turn shrugged off
Speaker 1: my questions. Old cataloging errors, he pronounced a little too quickly.
Speaker 1: This room's always had strange stuff. I figure some pages
Speaker 1: just slip out of order. When I pressed, he offered
Speaker 1: me a lot, both apologetic and slightly amused, as though
Speaker 1: I'd stumbled into a game that did not require more
Speaker 1: than a passing attention. I pressed, missus Kormiir, who replied,
Speaker 1: there in the right place, Evelyn, if you checked the
Speaker 1: original card files she handed me when it typed yellowing
Speaker 1: the catalog number and description confirmed the thirty two day October.
Speaker 1: But when I backtracked comparing to the larger library records
Speaker 1: past in prison, the same magazine and the main shelf
Speaker 1: war the correct date. Again, each reference pointed slyly to itself.
Speaker 1: Late that week, a visiting post of the name of
Speaker 1: Brian cheerful and deeply caffeinated, and mentioned over his loptop
Speaker 1: I heard a weey bit of focalore at the college.
Speaker 1: Students say the clock room remembers too much. Some say
Speaker 1: it's the only place on campus with finals week last
Speaker 1: three days. He laughed half a joke and half a dare,
Speaker 1: and scold a dudal of a melting pocket watch on
Speaker 1: his folder. By the time the leaf rain of Thursday arrived,
Speaker 1: I was less sure about what constituted an error or
Speaker 1: ac work. The library wasn't shy about its own contradictions.
Speaker 1: In some peculiar way, it wore them as proof of concept.
Speaker 1: At dinner with a friend that evening, I struggled to
Speaker 1: explain not ghosts, not lost time, but a local misalignment,
Speaker 1: a space that seemed to erode consensus as easily as furniture.
Speaker 1: Not even bored and threatened to disrupt my new obsession.
Speaker 1: I lay awake, rehearsing questions at ask next time. Why
Speaker 1: did people defer so generally to the old clock? Was
Speaker 1: it habit or something deeper? If there was an answer,
Speaker 1: it was not hidden in a gear or forgotten winding key.
Speaker 1: My curiosity no longer fit neat categories. Time bends, and
Speaker 1: so do people. I resolved to keep coming back with
Speaker 1: new questions every day. The river ran high. If you
Speaker 1: want to know how place things start with its stories
Speaker 1: and see which ones change. I arrived early, stealed for
Speaker 1: detective work. I carry my crosswood book, digital clock, a
Speaker 1: battered note book, and a folder of dates. My aim
Speaker 1: was to prod to interview the room, to ask its
Speaker 1: odd corners and its regulars to offer up explanations. I
Speaker 1: started with mister Daley at his usual table. He was
Speaker 1: sorting a bundle of all mapp reproductions and local news cuttings,
Speaker 1: reviewing what he called the proof of the Civic sended debate.
Speaker 1: I let him rattle off the project's time line, and
Speaker 1: when I suggested he could be recalling another event, he laughed,
Speaker 1: If the clock's off so sedate, That's how history works.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I smiled, but the joke slipped in sideways. When
Speaker 1: I pressed about the ground for the clock itself, he squinted,
Speaker 1: peering over his glasses. Always been off in one way
Speaker 1: or another. I remember as a boy, folks complained it
Speaker 1: ran fast when the river train still ran. My mother
Speaker 1: said it would get days sometimes. Dear Uncle Richard tried
Speaker 1: to fix it one summer, nearly drove himself mad. His
Speaker 1: voice softened. You never know if a place keeps time
Speaker 1: or just memories, Misses Griggs. The book group veteran remembered
Speaker 1: it differently. I swear, dear, when I was a student
Speaker 1: here at the clock would chimed three times at random hours.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it was right, sometimes not. My father used to
Speaker 1: say the clock only ked what the river was doing.
Speaker 1: She wrinkled her brow. It never made sense to me,
Speaker 1: but you get used to it. Several elderly patrons claimed
Speaker 1: the clock arrived some time after the high water. Others
Speaker 1: said it was always there, came with the building. The
Speaker 1: tales diverged. Some referenced an old clock shot by the
Speaker 1: Fairy Landing. Although a donation commemorating Charlie Black's retirement, the
Speaker 1: consensus was partial. Fragmentary. The one thing they agreed on
Speaker 1: the clock had always been peculiar, and the periodical's room
Speaker 1: more peculiar for sheltering it. Each memory it recounted in
Speaker 1: the lamplight made me more suspicious that the room's version
Speaker 1: of time wasn't just about minutes and hours are tugged
Speaker 1: at the order of events. The more the ground for
Speaker 1: the clock missed its place, the less regular the room felt.
Speaker 1: Patron swat stories of anniversaries missed are misaligned, of birthly
Speaker 1: celebrated early or late, because the rooms calend fit no other.
Speaker 1: I leafed through old or hid stories recorded on tape
Speaker 1: compiled by ernest librarian's past, where interviews gave dates for
Speaker 1: parades and pageants that disagreed with every other record I
Speaker 1: could produce. Mid afternoon, I returned to Miss s Krmier,
Speaker 1: my arms full of clippings and notes. You ever wonder
Speaker 1: why the clock fights being set right, I asked. She
Speaker 1: looked over her glasses, then cracked a smallness of smiles.
Speaker 1: Because time here works by its own rules. Most libraries
Speaker 1: run on policy, she said, dusting a stray pile of
Speaker 1: return books. Ours runs on well, local consensus. Maybe I
Speaker 1: press further, restless, but even the documents get wrong dates events.
Speaker 1: She shrugged again. You don't expect a river to fall
Speaker 1: backward to you, but sometimes here tries, she laughed, her
Speaker 1: gracious sound full of acceptance rather than explanation. I caught
Speaker 1: myself later glancing at the ground for the clock before
Speaker 1: checking my own watch, as if seeking permission to belong
Speaker 1: to the building's rhythm. In that moment, I wondered when
Speaker 1: had I started doing that? Where did the habit come from,
Speaker 1: and what did it mean to adopt a room's definition
Speaker 1: of real It was no longer a question of why
Speaker 1: the clock wouldn't keep time. The more pressing mystery was
Speaker 1: in what sense did the room itself keep time? And
Speaker 1: what did it mean for those inside? There comes a
Speaker 1: point with any curiosity when you accept the mystery is
Speaker 1: larger than its mechanics. Too Rainy Sada. Days later, I
Speaker 1: committed myself to project a log of library milestones mapped
Speaker 1: meticulously against the ground for the clock's wild hours. I
Speaker 1: checked old newspapers dug through microfilm, compared visitor registers, sign
Speaker 1: in sheets, and stacks of town meeting flyers. Patterns snuck
Speaker 1: up on me. Major local milestones, Reuben cuttings, disastrous fires,
Speaker 1: multi generational pageants, full seen to cluster in years when
Speaker 1: the grun for the clock was most out of sync.
Speaker 1: In the margins of one batted ledger, a note in
Speaker 1: pencil read cock restoration stalled May June nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: Periodical's room off limits that same span. The Riverside Carnival,
Speaker 1: which had always known to be held in July, was
Speaker 1: commemorated in one year by a parade in early May.
Speaker 1: Fliers for a protest over the loss of faery service
Speaker 1: gave two dates a week apart, depending on which record
Speaker 1: you trusted. Oral history is diverse orage Further, one long
Speaker 1: time librarian, now retired and living upstate, insisted that the
Speaker 1: old reading room burned to tinder in eighty nine, but
Speaker 1: a troph of late eighties a newsman proved page after
Speaker 1: page that no fire was ever reported, and yet oddly,
Speaker 1: the periodical's room floor had been replaced in ninety with
Speaker 1: a plaque near the grand Father clock, reading in grateful
Speaker 1: memory of the reading room's return. Small physical details, too,
Speaker 1: did not line up. I found a visitor's plaque, old
Speaker 1: and nearly hidden in the clock shadow listing regulars I
Speaker 1: had never met, not even during my year's teaching in town.
Speaker 1: Some appeared in photos from the late seventies, smiling in
Speaker 1: front of Christmas displays I could find no account of
Speaker 1: in library event calendars. I traced Ledge's reference in the
Speaker 1: donor of the clock, only to discover citations pointing toward
Speaker 1: Merit's curiosities. An antique shop on a crumbling Emerald Green
Speaker 1: Street named the City Directory had no record of each
Speaker 1: further search to solve. Neatly, the shop flickered out of
Speaker 1: newspaper listings. After nineteen twenty nine, s addressed winding up
Speaker 1: three blocks from anywhere at mid sense, until it was
Speaker 1: as if it had never been real. More than once
Speaker 1: someone suggested that Merit must be a family name, but
Speaker 1: no one could recall meeting anyone by that name in town.
Speaker 1: It became clear that there was no center to the
Speaker 1: puzzlonia shell contoured by stories that flinched from being fixed.
Speaker 1: The grand Father Clock wasn't merely malfunctioning. It was the
Speaker 1: library's peculiar cornerstone, rooting the periodical's room. In the ongoing
Speaker 1: restless act of remembering reality here bent itself quietly persistently
Speaker 1: to its chimes. When I walked the room, my steps
Speaker 1: began to echo faintly against the muted carpet, as if
Speaker 1: all the moments that might have been and might still
Speaker 1: be pressed in from the periphery. I found myself less
Speaker 1: interested in reconciling the archive and more curious about how
Speaker 1: the room changed every time the clock struck an hour
Speaker 1: outside the river, too, seemed as changeable as history, always present,
Speaker 1: always different, washing memory downstream and returning pieces when you
Speaker 1: least expected. Most afternoons, I would close my notebook just
Speaker 1: as the Grandfather sounded its improbable hour and look up
Speaker 1: to see others, old friends, new faces, doing the same.
Speaker 1: Some things, it seemed, were meant to be experienced, not solved.
Speaker 1: I found myself moving with a peculiar lightness through the
Speaker 1: following days. I still came to the library, still pinched
Speaker 1: my crossword pencil to life, still swept through the room's routines.
Speaker 1: But something had shifted. Not resignation, if anything, a keener
Speaker 1: sense of opportunity, a permission to dig deeper. Even if
Speaker 1: I now understood the rohness in the periodical's room was
Speaker 1: a scaffolding, not a problem to be solved my charts
Speaker 1: of clock discrepancies, maps of alternative anniversaries, interviews would regulars.
Speaker 1: These were no longer just attempts to write an error.
Speaker 1: They become gateways, pushing on the question of what a
Speaker 1: place remembers, why and by whose consent. I thought of
Speaker 1: Ruth's words memory as a weather pattern. If that was true,
Speaker 1: then the ground for the clock was the barometer, the
Speaker 1: anemometer at the very cloud. But if the clock's at
Speaker 1: the wind, what's at the clock? A week after my
Speaker 1: tour through conflicting archives, I made my decision. I would
Speaker 1: search for the heart of the anomaly, not at the
Speaker 1: sight of the clock's contradictions, but in its origins. A
Speaker 1: librarian's index card only offered gifted by Merit's curiosities. You
Speaker 1: are known. That was the finger pointing out of the margins.
Speaker 1: If anything at all could corn of the mystery would
Speaker 1: be this missing shop Merits and the people who remembered
Speaker 1: its existence or insisted it never had one. The library
Speaker 1: was a good tannhop for such rumors, but I needed
Speaker 1: a different vantage. So I set out for Main Street,
Speaker 1: collar up against the breeze nobe, but tucked in my sleeve,
Speaker 1: I began at Matlock's Hardware, Knowing the owner, Judy remembered
Speaker 1: every store from back to her childhood. Her shop was
Speaker 1: as old as the periodical's room itself, a walk in
Speaker 1: closet of shelling dust and linseed oil. Judy, did you
Speaker 1: ever know a place called Merrit's Curiosities? I asked for
Speaker 1: his pitch casual an antique shop. She frowned, wrinkling her
Speaker 1: brow as though reaching for her name on the tip
Speaker 1: of her tongue. Now Merrit, Merrit, she said, spinning a
Speaker 1: ring on her finger. That ring any bells? That wasn't
Speaker 1: the old clock shop by the Fairy, was it? Or
Speaker 1: was that charmers? She paused, No, Chalmers was clocks and
Speaker 1: keys across from mc gowan's bickery. Her gaze drifted. But Merritt,
Speaker 1: someone tried to open an antique store. I think just
Speaker 1: before the end of the trolley Lions didn't last. I
Speaker 1: remember strange hours. You'd see clocks in the window, but
Speaker 1: never the same one twice. Any idea what happened to it?
Speaker 1: I pressed? She shrouded, touching the counter as if for surants.
Speaker 1: Places come and go, Darling, Some of them don't even
Speaker 1: have the decency to leave behind their taxes. She grinned,
Speaker 1: But now you mention it. My father once bought a
Speaker 1: kitchen clock from some one along River Street. That was
Speaker 1: years before Merrit's, though, or after I thanked her and
Speaker 1: maid a note of the address River Street, after the trolleys,
Speaker 1: or before already. The story bent. At Gracie's Stationary, the
Speaker 1: oldest shop closer to the old ferry landing, the narrative
Speaker 1: shifted again. The proprietor, Louis insisted Merits had been up
Speaker 1: past the school, not by the river, and that is
Speaker 1: unt used to drop off ornaments and trinkets for store credit.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing add a Merit time repaired, time bought,
Speaker 1: time forgotten. Funny old slogan. Never knew what it meant.
Speaker 1: Then one went to the window, just stayed dark. Snap
Speaker 1: Shots of the shop appeared and disappeared in town memory.
Speaker 1: So did its location. Uneven at hours. It was on
Speaker 1: the river front, Whip near the bakery, or nowhere at all.
Speaker 1: Some said it had closed with a big snow of
Speaker 1: forty one, others that it stuck around until the molesiphoned
Speaker 1: away foot traffic. In the seventies, a few recalled the
Speaker 1: owner is a woman with an accent. Others remembered old
Speaker 1: mister Merritt, a quiet man, always dusting pocket watches, though
Speaker 1: he dressed like he was from another century. One old
Speaker 1: timer at the bus stop described the shops windows fogged
Speaker 1: with condensation, clocks taking at different speeds, like you could
Speaker 1: hear seconds overlapping. I collected these fragments, scroubling arrows in
Speaker 1: question marks, into my book. What struck me most was
Speaker 1: not the illusiteness of detailed memory is always muddy, especially
Speaker 1: for minor businesses. By the way, each account seemed genuinely
Speaker 1: confident in itself while under mining or gently correcting the rest.
Speaker 1: On a hunch, I visited the city arkavat City Hall,
Speaker 1: a blockie over bright building that always felt five degrees
Speaker 1: colder than the outside air, and looking for business licenses
Speaker 1: from Merit's Curiosities. I explained to the woman behind the desk,
Speaker 1: who wore large pink glasses and seemed unimpressed by my mission.
Speaker 1: She scrolled the macrofiche. Here is a Merit seat and
Speaker 1: feed in twenty three, but nothing for curiosities. I spelled
Speaker 1: out the name, even tried variations. There is a clock
Speaker 1: repair listing, but that's under Chalmers. No Chalmer sorry operated
Speaker 1: out of River Street between thirty four and fifty She paused,
Speaker 1: But if her talking about the building with the carriage
Speaker 1: lamp that was demolished in fifty eight. She spun the
Speaker 1: viewer back and forth, growing more irritable as I offered
Speaker 1: up clues. Are you sure you are not thinking of
Speaker 1: Palmer's collectibles? Another search, different day, this time an older
Speaker 1: man of volunteer hood. Spend decades with the rotary port
Speaker 1: over plat maps with me. No, no Merits was never
Speaker 1: on the river, must have been up near the freight yards.
Speaker 1: He slid a finger along a crumbling map, nodding as
Speaker 1: if confirming an internal compass. I saw it happening in
Speaker 1: real time, place in date flicker bent by the teller's
Speaker 1: or an orientation, just as the periodical's rooms clock bent routine.
Speaker 1: I sat outside afterward, beneath budding trees, logbook and hand,
Speaker 1: page off a page of addresses, dates, and adjectives. None
Speaker 1: of it lined up. Checking public records, property transfers, and
Speaker 1: city directories yielded nothing. Mirrors was a ghost, a suggestion,
Speaker 1: perhaps even a memory borrow from some one else's story?
Speaker 1: I walked along what remained of River Street, an avenue
Speaker 1: now overgrown with porkwheat and historical plaques. I tried to
Speaker 1: imagine the lost shops, the stalls on windows dusted with sunlight.
Speaker 1: Here at a feint overlapping ticks described by the bus
Speaker 1: stop veteran. How I could whole business vanish out of
Speaker 1: collective for record, yet leave behind a clock that nudged
Speaker 1: an entire building's experience of time. I stared at the water,
Speaker 1: river high from spring rain, and fought the frustration of
Speaker 1: circular answers. Discovery wasn't progressed so much as deepening. The
Speaker 1: clock was not just in effect, but a symptom of
Speaker 1: things this town resolved to remember or forget. In shifting consensus,
Speaker 1: I dug for fresh ground. If a shop could vanish
Speaker 1: and leave only a clock in its wake, maybe the
Speaker 1: trail would run deeper embasements and atta's places, memory docks
Speaker 1: into Foresif keeping one damp morning, I slipped into the
Speaker 1: library sub basement boxes down there marked do not we
Speaker 1: held them sworded rim in s a tan capsule by
Speaker 1: accident rather than by design, I began poking through brutal
Speaker 1: cardboard among the town minutes, Pta news utters and yellowed
Speaker 1: wore bonds appeals. I found a packet of letters tied
Speaker 1: in blue yarn. They were correspondents between librarians dating back
Speaker 1: to the late nineteen thirties and early forties. One envelope,
Speaker 1: addressed to missel Amory then had Librarian, was signed h
Speaker 1: Croft Collector slash clock Keeper, Merrit's Curiosities, my skin tingled
Speaker 1: deerhm is su Amory. The item is prepared for installation
Speaker 1: per your request. Please note face works, pendulum more replaced
Speaker 1: from different sources. You'll find station face, furry work scare,
Speaker 1: and the pendulum is of course from the blind Station
Speaker 1: clock loss in Last Seasons. Gale set your memory by
Speaker 1: it if you wish its time will keep, but only
Speaker 1: the right sort. Suggest not onnding too tight. Some clocks
Speaker 1: tell not the time, but the memory of time. The
Speaker 1: words resonated with the Storyages had been brushing up against
Speaker 1: the idea that the very components of the clock had
Speaker 1: come from mechanisms already emode from their original chronology. Though
Speaker 1: station face and firyworks referred a guest to clock's lost
Speaker 1: a disaster, floods, storms, or diseuse. Though blind Station clockopoetic flourish, perhaps,
Speaker 1: but possibly a little reference a clock once prominent that
Speaker 1: no longer saw daily use of track normal hours. A
Speaker 1: few new pieces of the puzzle fell in place. If
Speaker 1: the clock was itself a composition of rescue or remember
Speaker 1: time pieces, maybe the validity I'd felt in the room
Speaker 1: was not a malfunction but quality. The clock aggregated histories
Speaker 1: the way a library cox books, with all their contradictions,
Speaker 1: marginalia and local. It wasn't just a participant in memory.
Speaker 1: It was an artifact designed to absorb and manifest it.
Speaker 1: The letter is hinted a tacit understanding between donors and librarians.
Speaker 1: Install the clock, but expect its behavior to mirror a
Speaker 1: different sort of keeping. I was still mulling this when
Speaker 1: a few days later I struck up a conversation with
Speaker 1: doctor Malick, of visiting researcher in Fukor and Community Memory,
Speaker 1: who stopped by to gage interest in an oral history project.
Speaker 1: Our chat ranged from library as community half to the
Speaker 1: psychology of household relics. I mentioned the ground for the clock,
Speaker 1: hoping for amusement or simple anthropological curiosity. She didn't disappoint.
Speaker 1: You know, there's an old belief from the Carpathian towns.
Speaker 1: The timekeeper may lose minutes, but at Nevoulis's memory, some clocks,
Speaker 1: she shrub synchronize more with sentiment than Solnine. In village archives,
Speaker 1: the clocks left after disaster become tangled with the stories
Speaker 1: of what the place survived. A physical conference across roads
Speaker 1: of what did and didn't happen. She pulled out her phone,
Speaker 1: scrolling through notes. Smeral archivists say their collections where the
Speaker 1: local time, documents and recollections controlled not just by paper
Speaker 1: and card, but by the environment and the ordinary oodities
Speaker 1: structure a day like a bell tower that rings not
Speaker 1: on the hour, but when enough of gathered expecting it.
Speaker 1: Her formulation echoed my own INChO of theory at the
Speaker 1: ground for the clock, by virtue of its assembling out
Speaker 1: of memory lead imparts, had become a kind of meta
Speaker 1: time piece for the library, pulling narratives nearer that Fitts,
Speaker 1: shifting rhythm, casting outdoor of writing those that didn't a ligne.
Speaker 1: We sat in a corner of the periodical's room for
Speaker 1: a while, sipping tea as the afternoon drifted. I showed
Speaker 1: her my log of events and clock discrepancies, She laughed, delighted.
Speaker 1: Have you considered the cognitive signs angle, I confess my ignorance.
Speaker 1: I just know what I see people unconsciously bending to
Speaker 1: the old clock documents in this room, mistating themselves if
Speaker 1: you check them ties, she muse. There's a theory of
Speaker 1: mnemonica tructor's objects that pass the past, focusing recollections into
Speaker 1: local consensus the way a magnetic field oriensign violence. May
Speaker 1: be your grun for the clock is just a particularly
Speaker 1: powerful tract to one with a past two messy to
Speaker 1: let facts a line, so instead, memory paws up Bill's
Speaker 1: alternative time lines, even does a little writing on the fly.
Speaker 1: Are you saying the library itself becomes a vessel for
Speaker 1: all the stories people argue about, I asked, Maybe not
Speaker 1: a utely, but you'd expect a building like this with
Speaker 1: a stitch together past and habit of repairs to central
Speaker 1: as not true time but lived time, a permissive anomaly,
Speaker 1: so to speak, the sort other places iron out, but
Speaker 1: which a community like your's tolerates because it's useful for
Speaker 1: the local fabric. Her words gave me a new point
Speaker 1: of attack and a strange comfort as well. After she left,
Speaker 1: I lingered at the library, piecing together my own hypothesis,
Speaker 1: not as a physicist or a historian would, but as
Speaker 1: a neighbor, some one for whom facts and stories were
Speaker 1: separated only by the shifting of a clock's hand. It
Speaker 1: came to me quietly that what I was seeing was
Speaker 1: not a disruption, but an act of curation, a memory
Speaker 1: engine disguised as a time piece, operating through unconsciously rehearsed choreography.
Speaker 1: The periodical's room was a confluence point every hour, every time,
Speaker 1: quietly gathering thirds of alternate memories, smoothing the rough edge
Speaker 1: of communal disagreement, even if it left the records stuttering
Speaker 1: and the clocks out of sinc I put this to
Speaker 1: missus Kormier that same afternoon, as she stock palv returned
Speaker 1: books on a cart. Do you think the grand Father
Speaker 1: clock might be less about time more about memory's argument
Speaker 1: with itself? She considered. Do you remember the town's water
Speaker 1: parade the first centennial? Well, the year is always wrong
Speaker 1: in the papers, but you notice people still bring boats
Speaker 1: decorate even now. A smile was secretive. Maybe this is
Speaker 1: the only place where reality shows its footnotes library time,
Speaker 1: people time. I shared my findings at a volunteer presentation
Speaker 1: we always had tea and home baked muffins, an audience
Speaker 1: of regulars mixed with city staff and students. I offered
Speaker 1: my data and my conclusion. The ground for the clock
Speaker 1: seemed to aggregate not just local histories, but the uncertainties,
Speaker 1: the mutually exclusive stories, and the shifting emotional weather that
Speaker 1: defined our town. Some scoffed, ye're making a metaphor out
Speaker 1: of a malfunction. Others like Ruth grinned, you mean to
Speaker 1: say it's a living archive suits our crowd. A few
Speaker 1: quietly not it almost relieved. Yes, Yes, This explained why
Speaker 1: April seventeen, nineteen sixty six was sometimes a Sunday, sometimes
Speaker 1: a Wednesday. Five o'clock times set the day's tone for
Speaker 1: those in the room, why disagreements argued over decades felt
Speaker 1: less like dead ends, and more alike tributaries were routed
Speaker 1: by necessity. Student in the back of local Home on
Speaker 1: break said, I always thought the clock room was special.
Speaker 1: Never knew you why, just that it was easier to
Speaker 1: work in here, even if you lost track of the hour. Afterward,
Speaker 1: Bryan the postruct pulled me aside fresh coffee in hand.
Speaker 1: Even if we could set all the cocks to agree,
Speaker 1: what would we lose, he asked, maybe our best arguments.
Speaker 1: The library would just become another place to check the time,
Speaker 1: not a place to live it. I was left for
Speaker 1: the surfeit of understanding a kind that doesn't close the
Speaker 1: door so much as gently placed a door stop so
Speaker 1: others can keep coming through. Still there remained a marvel.
Speaker 1: I could not account for it. No two witnesses would
Speaker 1: agree exactly about when the ground for the clock had
Speaker 1: first arrived, or what years, Sir, the mastons fully took place.
Speaker 1: Even after years in town. Having taught some patron's children,
Speaker 1: I would meet an old regularist war i'd never seen,
Speaker 1: who showed me who's been clippings dated by the clock's hand,
Speaker 1: not the sun's arc. With that, my search relaxed. I
Speaker 1: no longer tried to set the records straight, only to
Speaker 1: record its shifts and seasons. I participated fully, gladly in
Speaker 1: the negotiation. In those weeks I found myself altered too.
Speaker 1: I ceased to fight the temptation to glance at the
Speaker 1: ground for the clock before departing, or to align my
Speaker 1: departure with its suggestive chimes, even when my phone showed
Speaker 1: a different hour. In my pocket, my crossword books, once
Speaker 1: stirring with corrections, became pebbled with notes about al turn
Speaker 1: at Monday's lived time, a river, parade year, and clock
Speaker 1: as wayfinder. Curiosity, I learned, is a species of belonging
Speaker 1: to ask whose clocks we listened? To us to ask
Speaker 1: which histories we permit ourselves to inhabit. The periodical's room
Speaker 1: had coached me in this, as gently as an alumnus
Speaker 1: reminding a teacher which chalbos whose one afternoon the Grandfather
Speaker 1: clock was up by a preposterous margin twenty five minutes off,
Speaker 1: though no one commented missus comers set out a tree
Speaker 1: of weak cold scones, Raphael hommed while shelving biographies, and
Speaker 1: a storm beat softly against the high window. The room
Speaker 1: for that hour felt both older and younger than I'd
Speaker 1: ever known, its regular as fixed and eternal as figures
Speaker 1: on a carousel. My notebook closed itself gently in my palm.
Speaker 1: The clock chine not quite in harmony with any other
Speaker 1: time piece in the building. Its melody was recognizable, a
Speaker 1: little flawed, perfectly itself. I glanced around at the rooms,
Speaker 1: occupant's reading, dozing, scribbling notes, half smiling into the lamp's
Speaker 1: honey glow. No one seemed rushed, not by clocks nor
Speaker 1: but questions. I found myself wondering not what time it
Speaker 1: was exactly, but what time meant in this room and
Speaker 1: where else in the world. So quietly and collectively agreed
Speaker 1: to keep itself just a bit and predictable, to let
Speaker 1: its archive hold both argument and answer, while other invisible clocks,
Speaker 1: I wondered, might shape the rhythms of our stories and
Speaker 1: our histories. Taking up these stations and seen in the
Speaker 1: folds of a thousand towns, how many stories do we
Speaker 1: inhabit without ever checking which clock sets the time? And
Speaker 1: that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I
Speaker 1: will see you in the next one.