John Gfroerer lives in Concord. He attended the Monitor’s My Turn opinion writing workshop this summer.
Ed Day is not a person anyone in Concord would have known. But years ago, he came into my life for a brief time and left an impression that lasts to this day.
When I got to know him, he lived in an old, restored brownstone on Corcoran Street in Northwest Washington, D.C., right near New Hampshire Ave. He had spent several years working in the Civil Rights movement, including the national office staff for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) while they were organizing the freedom rides down south. And while he loved the action of the movement, there was an artistic side to Ed that he needed to get back to.
In the basement of his home, he built a small shop and began making clocks. They were made out of plexiglass, battery operated, and perfectly shaped cubes — 4”x 4” x 4”. These were not about telling time; these were statement clocks. There were no numbers to mar the simplicity of their face, just a big and a little hand that went around.
They sold in art shops, including the shop at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Because of their construction material, they came in a variety of bright colors. Ed was not one for routine, so there were constant evolutions. There was the veneered wooden cube. Then there was the half cube, 4”x 4”x 2”. Each clock was personally signed and numbered by Ed.
As clock orders grew, Ed asked if I would be interested in learning to make them. I had a job that I loved, but the idea of being a clockmaker was alluring. I kept my day job, but by night I would steal away to Ed’s house and learn how to make his clocks. As might be expected, Ed had a system for every detail, the cutting, the drilling, the gluing, and the final buff. I remember he wanted to test every clock motor and had a large table with them all laid out just ticking away, a symphony of time waiting for purpose. Ed Day was a perfectionist.
But I don’t write this to talk about clocks.
Somewhere in the year I worked with him, Ed decided that his body functioned best on a twenty-six-hour day. And because he was no longer organizing freedom rides or had an office to report to, he decided to try out living that twenty-six-hour day in a twenty-four-hour world. The irony here is hard to miss, my clockmaker mentor was going to seize time as it best suited him.
When you called or dropped by you never knew where Ed was in his daily cycle. I might get to his house late in the afternoon and he would be having breakfast, or lunch, or getting ready to shut down for the day. When he did his nine hours of sleep, he always unplugged the phone so as not to be woken up by people in that other world. I had a key to the house, so I didn’t need to disturb him when coming in to work on clocks. Sometimes I would see him and sometimes I wouldn’t.
When I did see him, he was always in the best of moods. At every moment, Ed Day’s eyes were full of life, vibrant and engaged with all around him. Was it the twenty-six hour day or was it just Ed? At the time I was too young, too naïve, for such analysis. It had to be the twenty-six. He would talk about the weirdness of his schedule, reflecting with a smile the brightness of the empty streets of Washington, D.C. when he started his morning at midnight.
Eventually, the twenty-four hour world called for Ed’s participation and after several months he switched back to being in step with the sun and moon and the clocks he was making. New projects, new ideas were always bursting into Ed’s brain. In time, he stopped making the clocks.
Several months after I left D.C. I was in New York and went to the MoMA Museum store. There were his clocks, still on sale. A couple even had my signature etched on the bottom. We stayed in contact for a while, but after a time I lost track of him and what he was doing. At some point, I heard he left Washington, D.C. and moved to Washington state. And now, suddenly fifty years have passed since we made those clocks.
To this day, when my head begins to nod in the middle of an afternoon, I ask myself, “Is my body on a twenty-six hour day?” Or am I just getting old and needing those mid-day naps? Never took the twenty-six for a spin, but that’s alright. More important is the small way that Edwin Day has remained in my heart long after he taught me to make clocks.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.