NY missive no 200 - Clock

For a while I was using my i-pad as my alarm clock. Instead of reading a book - which, at night, invariably would send me to sleep so that C would come in later and find me glasses on, book in hand, light still on yet snoozing away - I would be clicking through news, reading a few paragraphs here and few paragraphs there. 

Then after my alarm went off in the morning I would decide to “check out the latest” before getting up, finding myself again wallowing in horrifying headlines. I say decide to, but it was more of a reflex action. Not the best way to start the day.

So I bought an alarm clock. Kind of ridiculous how that simple act became an important thing on my to-do-list which sat there for a while before I actually got around to it. And when I did, I shamefully spent five minutes doing so on Amazon instead of checking out Moon Electronics around the corner on Astoria's Steinway Street. (Outside of which I had stood on a sweltering hot May day nine months pregnant with tía D’s dog on a lead while she bought something inside - a camera I think? JNH was born that evening). Next time that I need something practical…Moon first. 

Because I had ordered in a hurry online, the clock ended up being much bigger than I thought it was. Its numbers and hands kind of leap out at you when you enter the room. I love it though. It’s just a clock. It has three functions: telling the time, waking you up when you need to, and a little light you can click on the top right in case you need to see the time in the dark. 

It was advertised as not ticking, which is true, but it does have a very feint almost imperceptible whirr which could be annoying but which I’ve got used to. And I honestly feel lighter when I go to sleep and when I wake up. Somehow more in the world, rather than being simultaneously barraged by it yet distanced. It takes being further into the waking day to navigate that gap in a meaningful way.

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This is my 200th EWINY entry. Next year it will be 20 years since I wrote my first one the day after I arrived in NYC to live. I was 30 then, and next year I’ll turn 50, and writing here, sometimes much too sporadically, has accompanied me through discovery, love, young children, my mother's death, teenage children, getting older gracefully and sometimes not so gracefully...with the constant of this magnificent city and its millions of residents living through the phases of their lives.