The clock man calls my clock "peculiar." He thinks the brass movement, while well machined, is oddly configured. He thinks the boxy case is clumsy.
Compared to the classic lines of shelf clocks by Simon Willard, Eli Terry or Seth Thomas -- standard-bearers of early American clock-making -- I guess he's right. I just happen to know my clock is perfect, but not for reasons he would understand.
When the crate arrived, I hadn't seen it in over a year, not since a swing through upstate New York not far from where it was built more than 160 years ago.
Rarely can you take a year to decide on a purchase. Had the dealer had an open shop, it would have been gone. Had it been bought for inventory and taken to shows, it would have been gone. But he had bought it for his own collection and showed it to me only after a rambling discourse on antiques led to clocks and to an invitation into his basement to see his Asa Mungers.
They resembled early 19th-century mirrors, in that two pieces of glass (the smaller above the larger) were fitted into a frame of carved columns, applied rosettes and an elaborate pediment.
One of them stood out. Surrounding its dial, positioned behind the upper glass, was a sparkling sheet of crystallized tin. Ice crystals stretching across a winter's window offer faint comparison. Add to that a pendulum bob shaped like an eagle, a wallpaper-lined interior, two signatures and a perhaps apocryphal story and I was hooked.
Asa Munger, I was told, was a German immigrant who had a deal with the State of New York for the production of clock cases by inmates of the Auburn penitentiary. Such mercantile use of penal labor, I suspect, would be frowned upon today. If the story is true, the prisoners' time and craftsmanship certainly were put to good use.
The dealer still had the clock when I finally called.
He reluctantly agreed to ship it.
In the crate which he evidently built himself, the weights, the eagle and the key were lovingly wrapped in pieces of furniture blanket. Neither the clear top glass nor the mirrored bottom glass had shattered. Only the second hand had come loose and lay forlorn at the bottom of the case. The only instructions were not to overwind it.
So I cautiously set it up and leveled it as best I could. And when I nudged the eagle, it ticked and tocked and ticked and tocked an hour at least.
I fiddled further with less success. And the second hand kept slipping, never managing an ascent without a sudden drop to "VI." And it didn't chime.
So I phoned the clock man, who made a house call with his magnifying loupe, case of jeweler's tools and vocabulary of assorted "Hmms" as he probed the neatly toothed gears. After straightening the pendulum rod, repositioning of the bell standard and performing some judicious lubrication, he set the thing in motion. And the eagle flew to the left, to the right and left and right. . . . And it chimed -- a hurried, almost harried clang, clang, clang -- but it chimed.
He said as he left, "I think your peculiar clock should run for many, many years."
For a couple of weeks all was well. Then the escape mechanism released during a winding and 8 o'clock rang out. So when 8 o'clock really happened 20 minutes later, it chimed 9. A few weeks and a few windings later, the chime was four hours ahead.
This was annoying, but then a second thing went wrong and compensated for the first and made the clock perfect. The standard, which held the bell against the resting hammer, slipped ever so slightly. When the hour struck, the hammer hit air maybe half the time. Instead of clang, clang, clang, clang; it went clang, whizz-whizz, clang.
Now why is that perfection?
Because when you're in bed -- even two floors above the clock -- and are having one of those restless nights or are generally fearful of not getting enough sleep, the sound of the chime doesn't compound the problem. It's not like: "Oh dear, it's 5 o'clock and I have to get up in two hours." It only means it's of an hour -- what hour, who can tell? More succinctly, it only means the clock is still running. And that's why I got an old clock in the first place -- to give my old house a heartbeat.
Asa Munger's 1830 shelf clock keeps pretty good time. You just have to be in the same room with it to know it.
Scott Ponemone is an artist, a collector and a layout editor of The Sun.