I never really understood the activities of adults, but I always assumed each movement was part of some infinite jigsaw puzzle. There were times I sat listening to them talk and I could almost feel myself in a balcony box, watching them perform some complex dance in which I was not welcome. Sometimes the things they did had an odd logic behind them, only it could not be understood until it was explained and laid out before me like a road map, and sometimes not even then.
It was autumn, and the leaves that swirled around my ankles as I walked home from school were the colours of fire. Not the colours real fire is, but the colours one uses out of the crayon-box when drawing fire. When I came in the door, my father had nearly all the clocks in the house out on the coffee table. I’d never realized we had so many.
“What are you doing with the clocks?” I asked as I took off my coat, suspecting some kind of game.
He explained, “Every fall everyone sets their clocks back an hour.”
I came into the living room to watch him wind the clocks, looking to the grandfather clock for reference. “Why? Does time move backwards in fall?” I was excited, sensing that one of the great mysteries of the grown-up world was about to be revealed.
He laughed, “No, we move everything back an hour so that we can have more light. Yesterday the sun was up at six before we were, so we lost an hour of light while we were sleeping, but tomorrow we’ll get up at seven and the sun will come up then too.”
I pondered this a moment. “Why not just do everything earlier in the day?”
“It’s much less confusing this way. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
“But if we keep moving back an hour, won’t we end up having lunch in the middle of the night?”
He was laughing again “No, because every spring we move all the clocks forward an hour.”
I thought it odd to move things in one direction only to move them back the other way when it was just as well to leave things as they were. Then father left the clocks on the table and went off to search the house and see if he’d missed any.
I woke that night to a strange sound coming from downstairs. It was a sort of “Cri-i-i-ick! Cri-i-i-ick!” that grew louder when I opened the bedroom door. I crept down the hallway, and at my parent’s door I could hear talking, so I knew they hadn’t gone to sleep yet and it must have been early in the night.
I went down the stairs as quietly as possible. All the lights had been turned off, but there was a faint bluish glow from the living room. Peering around the doorframe, I saw a bent old man seated before the coffee table, a clock in his hand. Tiny and glittering with a golden frame, I recognized it as the one kept in the china cabinet. The room seemed to glow with a soft blue light that left few shadows. Curious and unafraid, I stepped into the living room.
The man looked to me with dark eyes, that didn’t look like the eyes of a grown up at all. “It was missed. They must all be right.”
My father’s explanation had left me still standing outside the mystery, but something about his eyes told me he could give the answer. “What’s your name?”
“Tempus.” He set the clock on the table with the rest, with a hand that was smoother and surer than a moment before. His hair had darkened.
I took another step into the room. “Why do they have to be set back?”
“When you only move forward, you only get older. It’s important to sometimes move backward.” He picked up my mother’s watch from the table and fine-tuned it. He was younger now, much younger than my parents. “But they have to be exactly right, and there’s so many!” He put his face in his hands.
Wanting to comfort him, I struck on an idea. “If we reset the big grandfather clock, my papa will set all the clocks by that, and then you won’t have to wind all these.”
He lifted his face from his hands and smiled at my suggestion. He stood and we went to the massive grandfather clock in the front hall. By the time we reached it he was my height, too short to reach the face of it. It was hard balancing him on my shoulders. Tempus reached up and turned the elegant hands of the clock forward an hour, then closed the glass case and smiled down at me.
“Did that fix things?” I asked him.
“Maybe. Thank you very much!” He seemed lighter, and when he got down and hugged me he was shorter.
I heard my mother’s voice, “What are you doing wandering around in the dark down here?”
“I was talking to Tempus.” I turned to look but he had gone.
“You must have been sleepwalking.” She replied and led me back upstairs to bed as the grandfather clock chimed the hour softly.
