Patrick Carella

Mr. Ballard’s Clock

Every now and then I wander through flea markets hoping to find something I didn't know I'd been looking for.

Most Saturdays it's old tools, Depression glass, tarnished silverware, cracked vinyl records, family Bibles with births and deaths written inside. The accumulated leftovers of other people's lives.

I was halfway down the third aisle when I stopped.

A grandfather clock.

Walnut.

Brass pendulum.

Tall finials at its crown.

I knew that clock.

For a ridiculous moment I looked around for Mr. Ballard, expecting him to emerge from behind a table of cast-iron cookware carrying his ever-present mug of woefully stale coffee, as if forty years had somehow misplaced us both.

Instead there was only a dealer eating an egg sandwich.

"Beautiful piece," he said. "Estate sale."

I walked toward it.

There was the shallow gouge near the base where Mr. Ballard once banged it carrying too many books.

I could still hear him explaining it:

"I was chasing my brother around when I went headfirst into it, right here.”

He laughed, rubbing the dent with his thumb. And then his head.

There was the crack in the glass where a baseball missed its four-year-old target, Ned Ballard Junior.

There was no mistaking it.

I rested my hand against the walnut.

Cold.

Just wood.

But suddenly I was fourteen years old again, climbing the stairs to Apartment 1B on Bronx River Road.

It wasn't really an apartment.

It was a classroom without desks.

I never knew exactly what I was going to learn when I climbed those stairs.

Sometimes we'd spend an hour discussing a newspaper article. Mr. Ballard had a way of making yesterday's headlines feel as though they'd been written just for us. One afternoon we somehow wandered from an editorial into one of his oldest friendships.

"Glenn Curtiss," he said, as casually as if he were talking about the man next door.

The aviation pioneer.

Mr. Ballard had worked at Curtiss-Wright and knew him well enough to tell stories no history book ever could. By the time he finished, airplanes no longer seemed like machines. They were acts of stubborn imagination.

Another afternoon I noticed a brittle clipping folded inside a book.

Without looking at the page, he began reciting the poem printed on it from memory. Line after line. The paper had yellowed with age, but the words hadn't faded in him at all.

Then, almost inevitably, Shakespeare entered the conversation.

It didn't matter whether we'd begun with baseball, politics, or the weather. Before long Mr. Ballard was quoting Hamlet or King Lear as naturally as most people quoted the morning news. He never did it to impress anyone. Shakespeare simply lived in the same room with him.

And then there was the story he told only once.

As a young man, while hunting, he had accidentally shot a bald eagle. It was legal then, he reminded me before I could react, but legality had nothing to do with the sadness that settled over his face. He spoke of the bird with genuine regret, as though he'd spent the rest of his life apologizing to it.

Those afternoons rarely had a destination. They wandered wherever curiosity led, stopping only long enough for Mr. Ballard to wind the grandfather clock or refill our coffee.

He had a way of making ordinary conversations feel important.

They usually were.

Looking back, I realize Mr. Ballard wasn't simply my teacher. Through books, conversation, and the example of how he lived, he taught me to see the world differently. I thought education meant memorizing facts. He quietly showed me it was learning how to pay attention. The brass pendulum had turned a curious shade of verdigris—more turquoise than green.

Every Tuesday, somewhere in the middle of a conversation, he would excuse himself to wind the clock.

"You've got to take care of things that matter," he'd say.

At fourteen I assumed he meant the clock.

Years later I understood he was talking about far more than that.

I shielded my eyes from the shards of sun bouncing off the Roman numerals.

Once I had shown him a newspaper clipping about some politician caught in a lie.

"I don't understand why people do things like that," I said.

He folded the paper and looked at me.

"Judge not. Unless you have a horse in the race.”

That sentence stayed with me far longer than the article.

The dealer interrupted.

"You interested?"

"I had a teacher," I said.

"This was his."

He nodded politely.

To him it was just an old clock.

To me it had stood through hundreds of afternoons while a patient man quietly rearranged the furniture inside my head.

"How much?"

He named a price.

"I'll be back," I said. "I need to stop at the bank."

"No guarantees," he said.

"The good stuff doesn't stay long."

The bank was fifteen minutes away.

When I returned, the space was empty.

"The clock?"

"Young couple bought it."

He pointed toward the parking lot.

"They just left."

I stood there for a moment staring at the patch of pavement where it had been.

I thought I'd lost Mr. Ballard all over again.

I wandered the rest of the flea market without seeing anything.

On the drive home, memories kept arriving uninvited.

The afternoon he handed me The Odyssey because he said every fourteen-year-old should know what it meant to go looking for home.

The Saturday we spent talking about why people read at all.

His habit of answering questions with better questions.

His quiet "Yup," whenever something finally clicked.

I'd gone to the flea market thinking I'd found his clock.

Instead, I'd found him.

Not in walnut or brass.

Not in a pendulum.

In the way I still read a newspaper.

The way I still ask questions.

The way I still look a little longer before deciding what something—or someone—really means.

Somewhere, someone else was winding Ned Ballard's grandfather clock.

END

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Patrick Carella writes fiction and creative nonfiction about family, memory, advertising, obsession, and the strange dignity of American life. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Hobart, BULL, JMWW, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, The Eunoia Review, and The Hooghly Review, among others. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso and lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York.