Backward-running Clocks

In the aftermath of the Oscars and accolades received by Brad Pitt and others involved in The Strange Case of Benjamin Button, a synchronicity arrived from Jim Banholzer related to clocks running backwards.

Jim has several synchronicities posted on the site, including:
Big League Omenand Children of the Universe.

Interestingly, when I mentioned the movie to Jim he wrote back that he hadn’t seen it and didn’t know it related to a backward moving clock. So that adds another level to Jim’s synchronicity, which follows:

Recently, through Facebook I made contact with an old elementary school classmate. We lived on the same street in Virginia and sometimes walked to school together. In 1968, her dad was kind enough to guide her brother and me to sell tickets door-to-door for the Boy Scout Exposition. At $1 apiece, I hawked over 100 tickets, for which the Exposition leaders gave me some prizes. The award I remember most was a state-of-the-art clock radio, by which I could set to wake me up with loud music. I thought this was cool.

In the pre-digital era, this clock had a relatively simple design: Every minute a little number would physically flip down, until the top of the hour, when the hour’s column flipped over. This radio clock woke me up diligently for 25 years, for paper routes, school and work, until January 1993 when it went haywire, the week before I left Virginia to move to Idaho. I tried fiddling with it for a few days, but never could figure out why it now ran backwards.
Finally, I gave up and threw the clock radio away. I owned better radios and if this clock didn’t work, the device was essentially useless. Plus I needed to pare down on possessions for the move. For me, the strange behavior of that clock was a metaphor marking the end of my Virginia years.

Now sixteen years later, after reading books like Michael Talbot’s Holographic Universe, I wonder if the behavior of the clock was sparked by unusually high level of electromagnetic energy, somehow related to the excitement of my Idaho move.
Or was its time just up?
* * *
I’m now reminded of another clock incident. For Christmas several years ago, a friend brought me a prank clock that ran counter-clockwise. I found the perfect place for it and that was on the basement wall at work, where the newspaper employees had to come in once a week to label papers, then bundle them for mail. It was bad enough that they had to come in so early, and frequently some would arrive tardy. Eventually there were so many no-shows and tardies that our publisher decreed that if workers arrived late, they should be punished by losing some of their vacation time.

If they were cutting their arrival time close, most would look at the clock when coming in from the dark. They were supposed to be there at six sharp and if they arrived at 5:55 and looked at the clock, at first glance, it appeared to be 6:05. Many thought they had arrived late, which gave the other co-workers a slight reason to chuckle. This clock tripped quite a few people over the years.

When I abruptly quit my job, I left behind a number of possessions and tools at the workplace, included the backwards running clock. The friend who bought me the clock occasionally did some consulting work for the newspaper and one day rescued the clock for me. He came over, sat it on my table and said, “Hey, isn’t this your time?”

I now have that clock kept in our greenhouse, filled with several other backwards thinking devices and contrarian type books.
Jim Banholzer
P.S.
When I glanced at your blog, I saw that the last post was Renie and Adam Walsh. It’s a powerful ‘coincidence’ that the man, who helped me sell those Boy Scout Exposition tickets forty-one years ago, is a retired F.B.I. agent, who now works on American’s Most Wanted with John Walsh –Adam Walsh’s father!