Celestial and Temporal Oddnesses

The Moon has been taking up some strange positions lately. In recent nights it has appeared in a couple of windows where I can't recall ever having seen it before. I wonder if it is feeling well.

Wouldn't that be something if the Moon were somehow suddenly to disobey the ironbound laws of celestial motion!

And lately, as if affected by fluctuations in the Moon's gravitational pull, my mantel clock has also been behaving strangely..

Having always wanted a nice mantel clock, about 30 years ago I managed to wangle a good trade of a beehive plus a little money for just such a clock -- though not an antique but a contemporary one -- with a local clockmaker on whose property I kept some hives for a while.

By chance a couple of months ago W., a young guy who lives right up the road and is a very competent artist, was handed a commission, via another neighbor, the also highly skilled artist lady C., to paint a fancy dial belonging to a clock being repaired by that same clockmaker, J.

I mentioned to W. the mantel clock that I had gotten so long ago from J., and the fact that it had been acting up, and W. mentioned that to J., who offered to give it a look.  Meanwhile J. speculated that most likely in all these years the clock had never been oiled, and in that he was so right.

When I bought the clock, more than once J. told me that it had to be oiled at decent intervals, and I still have the little oil syringe that he gave me and that I conscientiously keep inside the clock door, safe, secure, and containing exactly the same amount of the same oil with which it had first been filled.

Today I am finally ready to tackle that task, but now I find myself unable to remember or to figure out how to get at the clock's innards without damaging something, and now the clock is openly doing some really strange stuff.

 It keeps good enough time, provided that I wind it every four days instead of the former seven or eight, but now it has taken to striking any hour that it damn well pleases, though it does actually sound the right number most of the time.   It is especially fond of striking twelve at two and later three in the morning but not in the afternoon, as if it knows the difference between AM and PM.

Meanwhile we're finding it amazing how difficult it is to listen out for the number of times the little gong is hit.   It reminds us of how thoroughly our hearing can  condition itself to tune out background noises of all kinds, because that is a loud clock.

--Maybe one day I can do something about the clock.  As for the other matter, it will turn out that I am the one who has wobbled off the right celestial path, and not the Moon.   But the clock does strike twelve at several of the wee hours of the morning.  My wife can corroborate that.