Death of an Alarm Clock

The universe has a strange sense of humor. Sometimes a life lesson can come in an unexpected form. For me that lesson was the death of an alarm clock. The alarm clock was old. For over 20 years, it sat faithfully on a nightstand beside my bed barking out the unwanted, and often unheeded, warning to bed out of bed every morning. I never gave the alarm clock much thought. It was just there occupying space. A necessary evil. It was never something I considered important until I went to set it one night and heard an unfamiliar sound. A small snap as the plastic button cracked and fell away, announced that this clock had performed its job for the last time.

The unexpected abandonment of a faithful clock can remind you of other things. That particular clock had been a Christmas gift from my college boyfriend who I thought was the love of my life at the time. "Forever" was not as long as our naive young minds had imagined it to be and the clock he gave me outlasted both our love and our post relationship friendship by several years.

I cried over that alarm clock that had been with me for half my life. Not because of the clock itself, but because it made me realize that everything in this world has a finite lifespan. Alarm clocks, relationships, friendships, and people. The lesson for me was that sometimes it is easy to take the people in our lives we love and need the most for granted and to forget how important they are to us until it is too late