I bought my digital alarm clock sometime around 1977. It was an unusual time to buy an alarm clock since I didn't have any fixed address. This was when I was a semi-permanent guest with friends living in an affluent neighborhood of the affluent Boston suburb of Belmont. I traveled a great deal then and I was not employed, or should I say I was self-employed, or maybe non-employed since I worked very hard with profit being a real goal and income being intermittent at best. I had signed a contract with Macmillan to write a biography of B.B. King for an advance of $4,000, which was spent in a few months' time.
My guest quarters were an unused office on the back of the house, whose only furnishing was an old-fashioned desk. My bed was a mattress on the floor. It belonged to me, purchased when I had had a proper home and a job and a wife. It was pure foam rubber, made in a factory in Connecticut, the only factory producing real foam rubber mattresses in the U.S. at the time when it burned down.
Buying an alarm clock was probably a gesture toward having a stable world, not that I craved stability. Perhaps it was more for companionship, since it was seldom that I had any other company on my foam island. It was not particularly fancy, just a clock radio with a digital display. I had no way of knowing then that this apparatus and I would be sleeping together for over 30 years.
Sometime in the mid-1980's, I think around 1987, a mishap nearly destroyed my digital companion. In the ten years we'd been together we had moved twice. I had a wife and a job (second marriage, third career). I lived on the ground floor of a 19th century house in Medford near Tufts University. There was no rug on the hardwood floor of the bedroom. I had a platform bed on which rested a box-spring mattress, having parted company with the foam job. Something happened to yank the clock off the nightstand, straight onto the hardwood floor with a sharp crash. The shock of the crash dislodged the digital display cutting off the top part of each digit. I put it back on the nightstand, half expecting it to blink off at any next minute. "Guess I'll be getting a new alarm clock," I thought to myself. But it kept on working and I adjusted to the weird display. When I moved again in 1991 the clock was still working and it came with me. A lot had happened in those few years.
New house, new wife, new life rising up ahead of me. I was back from the shambles of a tragedy, beginning life again, expecting a new life, i.e. my wife Cherie was pregnant. My cockeyed clock was in its place on the nightstand in my newly mortgaged home. We had acquired yet another new mattress, the previous one and its platform went quickly in the yard sale we staged. I watched it go from the bedroom window, thinking of all the nights I spent on that mattress, that replaced the foam job. This latest one was custom made at a mattress factory on the North Shore where you choose all the components and they fabricate it for you in 10 days' time. That one lasted about 10 years, until an overly generous friend heard Cherie talking about the new space age material mattress called "Temperpedic." This material conforms to the shape of your body and hugs you like a bed of soft clay. The friend pulled out his credit card and insisted she order the mattress by phone. They aren't cheap, these hugging slabs. I don't know where the custom-made mattress migrated, to the dump, perhaps. It had cost us about $800, as I recall. Its space age successor cost more than twice that.
One year Cherie decided I should have a new alarm clock for Christmas. It looked really impressive when I plugged it in beside the old one on the bed stand. But the radio sounded awful, so it went back to Sears or where ever it had come from. The old clock was reinstated on the bed stand.
I think about all this history when I stare at the clock in the night. I have what's called "sleep continuation insomnia." I fall asleep readily but wake up after five hours, gradually, but steadily until full wakefulness is upon me. Then I lie there in semi-darkness, eyes sometimes shut, sometimes open. In an otherwise dark room the light from a digital display can be emphatically bright. Without my glasses the digits bloom with fuzzy edges, but if I just barely crack one lid, the resulting narrow slit approximates a pin-hole and the digits lose their bloom. I have become a student of the digits.
The position for each digit has 7 bars, 4 vertical and 3 horizontal. For the digit '0' all six exterior bars are lit. The digit '8' uses all 7 bars.
The dislocation of the display crops off the top horizontal bar from each digit. '8' loses its cap, but it is still a headless 8, looking like goal posts. '0' becomes 'U'. The only ambiguity is between '7' and '1' because the headless '7' and the '1' are indistinguishable. When the clock reports "4:31" it might really be "4:37", and vice versa. The ambiguity occurs only in the units position because the digit '7' never appears in the tens place because it could never be, say "2:71". The 1/7 ambiguity never matters in the hours-digit because a person is not likely to confuse 1:00AM with 7:00AM.
This digital reverie is only incidental, more or less like punctuation in the stream of my consciousness. I don't think only of the digits or the time. I think about whatever I think about. Sometimes I think about the fact that I'm awake. Or am I? Once I had this private conversation with myself, annotated with timestamps:
2:00 I am awake.
2:08 I am falling asleep.
2:10 I am asleep.
2:20 I was awake when I said "I am awake."
2:25 I was awake when I said "I'm falling asleep".
2:40 I was awake when I said "I'm asleep".
2:44 I was asleep when I said "I am awake".
3:00 I am awake.
3:10 I am asleep.
Someday, one or the other of us, me or my digital clock, will stop marking time. But as long as it keeps time, as long as the digits run in order, I'll keep that clock. Then one of us will go on alone, without the other.
June 17, 2011.
[Next installment: "Me and My Toaster."]