My mother played the Arizona lottery. As far as vices goes, it wasn’t much of one. She’d buy a ticket — one ticket — each week and then watch the results on TV on Wednesday evening. Me, I don’t understand lotteries and I don’t play them, but I understand enough to know that if you match several numbers you win. What you win depends on how many of the numbers you picked actually match. It’s not that complicated, I suppose, so maybe what I don’t understand about lotteries is why people play them. To win, of course. To hit it big. But the odds … well, they just aren’t that great.

One time my mom had five out of six numbers correct. (If she’d had all six correct, I’d probably be working at a better computer now.) Apparently, it’s not that uncommon, getting five out of six. In each drawing, several people come just that close to scoring the big one. Theirs are the upper-tier “consolation prizes,” and in this case my mother won a grandfather clock. Nothing to get all excited about, but my mom did get all excited. (She was like that.)

Whenever I visited, the grandfather clock would interrupt my sleep during the first few nights. I wasn’t accustomed to nocturnal tick-tocks and ding-dong-dings. I’d wonder to myself, Who needs to be reminded of the passage of time while asleep? But there wasn’t a mute button you could press, and back then the term airplane mode could only have been construed as a comment on travel fashion, meaning that if you wanted to enjoy the benefits of the clock grandfathering during the day, you were just going to have to put up with its grandfathering during the night as well.

It’s funny how quickly we sometimes adapt. After a few days (and nights), my brain would find its own form of airplane mode and largely tune out what had been a disruption. Or rather, the disruption became something else — more a form of comfort, a soothing presence in the background, an affirmation of my continuing existence, even in the dark and far from home. Like women in proximity syncing their menstrual periods, the grandfather clock and I gradually found a rhythm we could live with. We became, in a word, family.

Later, I took the clock with me. It was one of the items I chose to keep when my sister and I performed the unpleasant task of dividing things up. Somehow I managed to wedge it into my vehicle (a 2000 Ford Sport Trac) for the long drive home from Sun City, Arizona to Houston, Texas. There was just the spot for it in my home at that time, a small apartment on the campus of the university where I taught. For several years it stood there in a cozy nook, alongside the bookshelves in the living room, doing what it had done before and all along, the only thing it knew how to do, tick-tocking and ding-donging. I think it felt at home.

Mechanical objects, like people, are prone to failure. After a time, the grandfather clock that had belonged to my mother and that I had hauled back home with me began to lose track of time. I’m not surprised. The craftsmanship was nothing to write home about. It really was more decorative than functional. I suppose I could have had it repaired, but it’s not easy lugging a grandfather clock back and forth to a shop that likely doesn’t even exist anymore. Oh, I’m sure I could have found a way. There’s always a way, right? But the truth is, I didn’t even try. I accepted the clock as broken and didn’t hold anything against it.

It came with me when I moved to my current home, only now it stands in the second bedroom, pushed up against a wall in a closet, turned to the side, with a few odd objects inside the glass cabinet and atop the wooden frame, and hanging clothes for the most part hiding its familiar face. As before, I’d had to dismantle the pendulum parts for transport, only this time I didn’t bother to reassemble them. After all, it didn’t work anymore, and there wasn’t even the right kind of space for it in my new home. As I write this, I realize that I feel guilty about my shabby treatment of what was once a prized possession of my mother. Guilty, and slightly ashamed.

I don’t think of it often anymore. Why should I? It stands in a closet, out of the way, a closet that I seldom open. And yet sometimes, in the night, when my dreams leave me empty and needing affirmation, I can almost hear the sound from the other room, not just the room that’s next to mine but the all those rooms a thousand miles or more away. The distance doesn’t matter, you see. The distance doesn’t matter, it says, swinging side to side. The distance doesn’t matter. Before long, I too chime in. The distance doesn’t matter, I say in sync. It’s just a matter of time.