Wound Too Tightly
Today, I noticed some interesting parallels between my relationship with Maggie and the old clock that I fixed yesterday. I was at a gathering of relatives at my grandparents' house for Memorial Day. I gave my grandma Tulida the results of the last project she had requested of me; a set of antler buttons I had crafted. Like clockwork, my grandma gave me a new project to work on. This time, it was an old clock her brother had built which had stopped working. I tried starting it, but the first gear that the pendulum interacted with didn't want to turn. I could see that it had been wound up enough on both springs, so I tried adjusting the pendulum's length. Still no go. It didn't even work when I swung it back and forth as far as it could go. I couldn't see well enough what was going on internally, so I took the mechanism out of the old wood enclosure. I was careful to keep track of how it fit together so that I'd be able to reassemble it.
Upon its removal, I was confronted with a mess of gears, rods, shafts, ratchets, and cogs, all sandwiched between a couple metal plates. I was intrigued with it and started wracking my brain and experimenting with it to try to figure out how it worked. After some time, I could see that one half of it was solely responsible for the chiming of the hours, powered by a large torsional spring. It utilized a couple components which I found especially interesting. The first was the "air brake" as I called it. It was a small metal plate with a couple of holes in it which spun at a rapid rate when the chime mechanism was sprung. It was tuned to slow it down and have it chime at a specific rate, one every second of so. The other interesting component was the timing gear, which had teeth in a specific pattern. It had teeth with deep gaps and shallow gaps. There was a lever arm which would catch on the deep teeth, but keep it moving through the shallow teeth. The pattern started with four deep teeth; one to stop it after the twelve o'clock chimes, then one for twelve thirty, one for one o'clock, and one thirty. Each half hour had a single chime, so that is why there were pairs of deep teeth all the way around it. In between them was an increasing amount of shallow teeth; one, two, three, all the way up to eleven for the twelve o'clock chimes. This system used a little pin on a gear to lift and drop the hammer arm to hit the coiled metal chime. It was triggered by two metal pieces stuck to the shaft which turned the hour and minute hands. The timing was driven by the other side of the clock, with its' own torsion spring. The swinging of the pendulum at a regular interval rotated a catch back and forth and allowed a saw-blade like gear to turn; at least it was supposed to. This gear was connected to another one through a smaller gear, which multiplied the timing. A few more gears in the series multiplied it out from the initial one rotation per 120 ticks (2 per second) to be able to rotate the main outer shaft 360 degrees once every tweve hours. This was then divided back down to rotate the inner shaft, the minute hand, once every hour.
I could see that the only problem with it was that it was turning it too hard, so that the first gear didn't allow the catch plate to function properly. I realized that it was simply wound too tightly. I knew that I had to release the spring to be able to reset it, so I found the ratchet which held it in place and started to take it off. All of a sudden the spring went "whraannnng!" and expanded to three times its diameter in a split second. I dropped the clock onto the table in surprise and pain. My pinky finger on my left hand had been sliced badly by the thin coiled metal spring. I called for a towel, and my grandma - a retired nurse - helped me with some first aid. I saw that it could have been a lot worse, because it only hit the side of my finger, and didn't go all the way through. But it did slice right through the corner of my fingernail. If it had been over just a bit it could have cut my nail right in half, and gone down to the bone. My dad was just glad that it hadn't hit me in the eye.
Of course, the tinkerer that I am, I couldn't just leave it at that. After I had bandaged my finger and iced it down a bit, I set about to complete my repairs of the clock. I reset the sprung spring, and then decided on a safer, slower way to release the tension on the other one. I propped up the catch for the timing gear and let it run through for an hour or so, and stopped it when it matched up with the current time. Then I bent some of the pieces back which had been damaged from the drop, and put it back in the housing. I adjusted the pendulum, and set it in motion. It worked fine, except the hammer didn't contact the chime any more. So, instead of messing with the internal components any more, I tried bending the chime up a bit so that it would reach. *Snap*. It was originally built in 1964, and the metal had oxidized to the point that it was too brittle to be bent very much at all. The clock worked, but it had no voice.
So, back to my thesis statement that a relationship is a clock. Maggie and I met in her freshman year and my junior year, about two and a half years ago. We went through a lot together: my trip to Ohio to work in the air force research labs for a semester, her family problems, getting her drivers' license, several finals weeks, and much more. With each of these things, the spring got wound tighter. We did have many good times which would help her to keep her mind on other things besides her worries. This would let the clock tick for a while, and release a bit of its tension. The problem was that Maggie didn't know how to let go of things entirely, so it could never wind down enough. She held on to all of the hurt she had felt in her relationship with her father, and she couldn't even face him to speak with him. She held on to the feelings of abandonment and separation she had when I had gone to Ohio. Her failures in the first few driving tests turned into an almost insurmountable challenge. It was a large strain for me to have that extra tension; I felt a burden to take care of her and help her to relieve it when I could. If I didn't have a natural tendency to want to help people with that kind of thing, our clock would have stopped ticking a long time ago. She feared losing me, so she clung to me ever more tightly, and I eventually started to feel trapped. I knew that at this point if I stayed in the relationship, I would only be further contributing to the problem. I couldn't keep trying to help her let go. I had to let go myself. A couple weeks ago when Maggie told me that we couldn't go on that way, I knew it was time to release the ratchet. It was a difficult process, and it went surprisingly quickly. It hurt a lot for a while, but we both were willing to let go, and to start the healing process. We both were able to ask for help from higher powers, and found some peace with the whole process. A lot of good has already come from it, and our clock is ticking again. Maggie has started talking with her father, and has started to take matters into her own hands. She has shown a lot of maturity in how she has handled this transition. The clock is definitely lacking the chime it once had, but I think it will be a healthier one for that. I suppose that clock will be a lot more pleasant now that it won't ring loudly in the middle of the night and disturb peoples' sleep *wink wink*. I could always make a new bell by cutting and bending an aluminum can. It wouldn't be the same, but it may work just as well, if not better. With good maintenance, that clock will tell time for as long as is desired. I will be able to maintain my friendship with Maggie. It works fine now, so it is not necessary to get rid of that much loved clock, but it may be a good idea to get another clock someday. Only time will tell.
