Every kitchen should have a clock. Up on the wall, over the sink or maybe over the entry door. They give us the time of day but also they keep watch. I don’t like the crazy kind, cats with moving eyes and tails or robots with marble eyes. Those are cool but they’re not for the kitchen.
Being the kitchen clock is a serious job. Everyone living there sees you constantly. Are you electric with a second hand that moves slowly and smoothly around the face? Maybe hands that glow in the dark? But ideally your face lights up, pink, green, blue orange…but most of all, you are analog. Digital clocks have no soul.
You tell us when we’re late for school, when it’s time for the paper to come, or scare us when we realize it’s past time for our children to be home. We laugh, we eat, we cry and we die…all within your watchful gaze. You offer no judgement when we can’t sleep because we are troubled; seeing you there comforts us.
Your own time is not measured in years or days like ours. It’s measured in the wear of mechanical parts one upon another until eventually one breaks off and can’t move anymore. Sometimes you survive us, and sometimes we survive you. The difference between us is that you don’t care. We invented you to measure the time, which itself we invented. It’s a handy invention and it makes sense of the universe. But it also measures our mortality. Tick, we’re older. Tick, we’re older. And so on and so on. The seconds turn to minutes the minutes to hours the hours to days and the days to years.
You don’t care. You’re a factual, non-emotional machine. You watch us drink our coffee, and eat our dinner and then we are gone.
We have a clock in our kitchen. It’s cute, shaped like a teapot so my wife asked the previous owner for it. As far as the clock is concerned, we are interchangeable. We will likely leave it here when we move someday. Everyone moves someday. It seems like it belongs to the house rather than the current occupants.
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I recently started cooking for the men’s breakfast at our church, and was dismayed to find no clock in the kitchen.
Its absence left me confused and lost as I had to set my phone on the counter so I could see it in order to set the rhythm of pancakes coming off the griddle. Next week I’m buying a wall clock. It’ll be analog.
What are your thoughts regarding the fact that kitchen clocks are now accompanied by coffee pot, microwave, and oven clocks?
Those digital clocks will betray you. If the power goes out they’ll just blink at you. With an electric wall clock you’ll know when it went out and for how long. If it has a battery of course it will keep going. Plus digital clocks are cold. We need warmth…humans are analog not digital.