This Little Light

Telling time

It’s still the beginning of the New Year, and so the opportunity still exists to make some changes and improvements in my life with that extra burst of energy the start of the year brings. I keep reading and hearing about spending more time offline (less time online framed to underscore the positive) and that seems like a good place to start —the worse the news, the more I’m inclined to be sucked further into my phone, partly so nothing sneaks up on me when I’m not paying attention (impossible, whenever you’re looking here, there’s plenty going on over there ) and partly like I’m holding hands with every person I ever met. They used to call it doomscrolling, but sometimes looking at social media feels like running around a giant hospital going “I know, I know—I’m so sorry, let’s hope for the best” to panic-stricken loved ones with family members in the ICU, but in this case the family member is the place we grew up in and blithely expected would always be there for us but you went back to their house for their pajamas found pretty awful porn and racist garbage in their dresser drawer and flashed back “oh yeah, maybe they always were a creep in a way I could conveniently overlook, cause they always had my favorite cookies and didn’t judge and scold like my parents did…” We’re all in the hospital in kind of vigil wondering what if anything we can do, how to take action, but we need to keep checking in with each other and it keeps going around and around.

So one of the ways to get off my phone is to start wearing a watch. “Great!” I thought, “I can do that!” suddenly remembering I have a load of old watches. I managed to find the box with a few of them, each one a memory I haven’t been able to let go of. My mom’s delicate fifties one - so tiny there’s no way I could ever read the face let alone get it on my wrist. A Fossil one with rough-hewn brown leather band that’s “authentic-looking” in that nineties way, back when the world discovered cool old stuff , “vintage” became a thing and eBay meant you’d never find a bargain in somebody else’s trash again. Another one on a mod late sixties yellow band I thought of taking in to a jeweler to replace a battery but fear they’ll laugh me out of the store, like I’m a clueless relic bringing in a bog standard (har har) bedpan I’m convinced is a valuable soup tureen. Probably easier to just buy a new watch.

The other idea I came up with or maybe read in another Substack—which is another place I spend a lot of time: too much, these days?—is to go back to using a bedside clock. My habit of lighting up my iPad in the middle of the night to check the time, and setting its alarm when I need it, works fine, but there’s always the temptation to “just check in” with the news and email (I don’t have any social media on there but if anything’s gone on in the night on the other side of the world, it can be like Tinkerbell, the light of my device leading me out of the bedroom, down the stairs to the kitchen counter where my phone lives). I started searching “simple bedside clock, no ticking” and saw there were all kinds of developments in the world of digital alarms and small table clocks. They weren’t expensive either. But then I looked at reviews and some of them made it sound like my cure would be worse than the disease - I’ve stayed in enough hotels to know that alien clocks can be a curse, requiring pillows heaped on top to mute the light, when the cord is so deeply embedded behind a headboard you risk breaking your wrist unplugging it. Or SOUND - no matter how silent a manufacturer claimed their device was, some reviewer would report: “DON’T BE FOOLED - IT TICKS!” or “This clock is not silent as it states !! This is the 2nd clock I’ve had to throw away as it ticks so loudly .. waste of money !” or “Although it’s amazing clock for some people I personally don’t like it cause it’s way smaller than I imagined and the voice couldn’t wake me up.” I found myself caught up in the dramas of the negative reviewers, picturing flights missed, appointments needing to be rescheduled, sleepless nights - buying a new clock suddenly felt like inviting a random stranger into the bedroom, one who held a whole lot more power than my dear old chum the iPad.

So I lay there in bed, remembering this really cool mod clock I’d had back in New York. It was a cube clock radio by Panasonic that sat for years above the kitchen sink until I decided to press it into service as a bedside clock. Like quite a few things I dumped in our effort to pack up and move, back in 2024, I regretted the loss of this stylish item I must have deemed pointless (wrong plug, and how would the radio work in England? My beloved local stations WGXC and WAMC aren’t going to be there - no Delilah in the night or 60s pop radio on an FM or AM signal out of Poughkeepsie. BBC Radio 4, how would that find its way in?) I don’t know anything about how radio frequencies work, and maybe I’d given up on that item too easily. I kept trying to remember where I’d gotten rid of the mod clock radio - Second Show thrift store in Hudson? The Goodwill on Fairview, where a friend found one of my Mod Housewife tea towels in the dumpster out back, along with a rare sketch by 18th century British painter George Romney? I hoped it hadn’t ended up in the 1-800-GOT-JUNK crusher…

The next morning, I glanced at the top of the bedroom bookshelf and hallelujah, there was the cube clock radio! I hadn’t dumped it after all, but kept it as an artifact and was using it to prop up paperbacks, a cool-looking object it hadn’t occurred to me I might be able to use. It felt like reconnecting with an old friend. I just need to try it out with one of our plug adaptors. Maybe it will be just what I need to help keep me offline when I should be sleeping. Maybe the radio will tune in some ancient Radio Caroline broadcast from the late sixties, or a Johnnie Walker Sounds of the 70s episode from the early 2010s? (Eric and I got to meet up with him for coffee near the BBC years ago, he was as lovely as his voice…)

But I’m leaving for the US in a few days and have to catch a train to Heathrow early Thursday morning. What will it be like to be right there, in America unraveling? I’m honestly a little scared and thought “should I cancel going?” I live here now, why am I putting myself back there, it’s just a few gigs, the Folk Alliance conference in New Orleans. A chance to see my brother in NY, play a song for Jill Sobule’s birthday in NYC. But every time I pick up my guitar to practice and imagine singing in a room with people who are all going through this rough patch, I think “We’ll be together, for real. Holding on.”

I don’t want to miss my flight. I think I’ll wait to try out that old clock when I come back.