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Time Saw
The world passeth away. (1 John 2:17)
This will shred you, Cody told me as he handed over the corded saw. I nodded and felt
the bulky, green saw sink in my novice hands. I had never seen a grinder before. It was a
handheld saw with steel wires woven together to buff off rust from metal. The thick, circular
blade reminded me of the ends of silver-colored metal ropes woven together. I thought to myself,
Just one more saw. That summer I was getting to know lots of different saws: chop saws for
quick cuts, and sawsalls with straight blades that moved back and forth like a mini-version of
two lumberjacks. This grinder was handheld like the sawsall but instead of a thin millimeterwide blade, the grinders blade was half an inch thick, and circular.

Respect this or it will eat you, Cody reminded me through his orange, Oakley shades.
The crew had a busy morning preparing the house for the upcoming wedding: new banister, new
blinds, new paint. By the afternoon I had done all of the edging prep for the decks new paint
job. Shawn and Cody decided I should get a head start on prepping the rail for a fresh coat of
black paint. The rusty, iron rails needed lots of lovin. The entire banister was spotted with
flakes of black paint bubbling off the metal, leaving rust rings in big circles like dried sap.
Thanks to the miracle of modern powertools this will be relatively fast paced. Cody gave me the
basic technique: rub up and down the pole back til it was smooth and flake free.

Cody was pressed for time. He cut his all-youll-ever-need-to-know-about-grinding

tutorial down to a ten second lecture: Respect this or it will shred you. One thing Cody always
had time to do was complain about his tools and the biggest bone he had to pick with the grinder
was that it was old. The on/off switch took some lovin and because the metal blade was so

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worn down, bits of the wire would fly off and stick into your jeans. I didnt have to worry about
that problem cause I was wearing shorts and those scraps of metal would just stick into my
shins. I was rubbing the railing down to its bones as clouds of red dust plumed whenever I leaned
into the rust stains.

Grinding is quiet work. That may seem counter intuitive given all the noise a power tool
makes but its truea grinder shuts you up. You cannot carry on a conversation with anyone but
yourself. Grinding time is meditation time. Time to remember why I was doing all of this
summer construction work in the first place. I am an English major for crying out loud not a
woodshop rat; but then again, how else would I earn spending money for the Cambridge study
abroad? There was no other job that would hire me for two months, get me trained, and then
have to replace me when I leave to enjoy myself in Jolly ole England.

That summer was a dream. Walking down Kings Parade, on the cobblestone streets,
passing street musicians, Asian tourists, students, and the gondolier hawkers on the prow, I
would wonder as I wandered. Most tourists converge infront of the imposing gates of Kings
College, a place where, apparently, for ages there was a desk left out on the lawna desk made
out of bones. Skulls with empty eyes sockets would staring out at the passersby. It was a
message to visitors and students alikeyour time is limitedlive! By the time I traveled to
Cambridge the desk made of skulls was no more. In its place a new memento mori graces the
corner of Kings Parade, a clock instead of a desk: The Corpus Cristi Clock. The eight-foot tall
artwork was revealed in 2008 by Stephen Hawking. Tis a curious clock. A clock without hands
or numbers. Its face is made of one large piece of 24-carat gold-gilded stainless steel. When I
walked past it for the first time I stared at its rippling center, hypnotized. I was rounding the

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corner of Benet Street and Kings Parade, taking my time, hoping to kill a few hours with
Tuesday afternoon stroll. I was planning on paying homage to my Bennett ancestry by visiting
Benet street and the oldest surviving church in Cambridge, when I first saw itthe clock that is.
The desire to discover my family roots dimmed when I stared through my reflection at the
pendulum swaying beneath the clock. That first moment I beheld the curious clock I thought of a
golden grinder, but instead of a five-inch diameter it was a five-foot tall. Like a saw, the clock
was round and had a high, metallic sheen bending the light into waves around the center. The
edges are shaped like shark teeth and were pushed along by a menacing, mechanical grasshopper
creature on top. The locust-looking monster stepped forward and pushed the clock along with
each second. The beast has a nameChronophage The Time Eater.

Every minute its mouth gets larger til a minute is completed and its jaws snap shut.
Constantly eating time and swallowing another minute that will never come again. While I stood
hypnotized by this curious clock larger than myself (with a locust larger than my dog at home)
the pendulum hiccupped backwards . . . and then continued as normal. I looked around. Did
anyone else see that? I asked myself. The second hand . . . I swear it stopped and even went
back for a second. I must be jetlagged, I began to reason to myself, and then the pendulum
went slow mo. I looked around, Ok someone else had to have seen that too. A few Asian
tourists pointed at the pendulum and gasped and rattled off in their native language. I pointed at
it to and we all nodded at each other. Then the four of us inched closer to the glass, hunched
over, held our breath and waited. We watched the massive gold pendulum pace back and forth
like a gold lion pace behind its cage.

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It turns out that the clocks inventor, John C. Taylor, had devised a way to show the
unpredictability of time: the clock stops, hiccups, or reverses from time to time to create minutes
that range from 40 seconds to 90 seconds long. The result is that you cannot trust the clock. You
cannot trust timemost of the time that is. The clock (which functions without electronic gigots
and gadgets) auto accelerates or decelerates thanks to the locust-like Chronophage on top of the
curious clock so that every 5 min the clock is precisely on time. It might profit from a disclaimer
above it: Use with caution.

The grinder saw could also use a similar caution sign, it was equally unpredictable. How
unpredictable can a handheld saw be, one might ask. Its not like it reverses directions all of a
sudden. Well, maybe not; but if I pressed too hard on the left side of a pole the grinder would
lurch forward (catching the edge on its clockwise spinning cycle). And if I pressed too hard on
the right side of a rail than the grinder would catapult back towards me and spring off the rail
like a diving board. Add on top of that, if I rotated the monster perpendicular the toque of the
circular blade spinning clockwise would shift that torque into the body of the grinder. I felt like I
was manhandling a caged lion that was clawing away at my innards . . . or at least nibbling my
fingers since it would snag on my gloved fingers if I was not careful. Come on, I thought, I
am an adult here; get it done.

The grinding went along smoothly while Cody and Shawn were finishing painting the
other poles a Turkish coffee brown. I was kneeling down to grind off the rust on the lower parts
of the banister. The corner pole was the hardest part because I would have to lean over the
balcony to get the most rusted patches. I didnt like the feeling of heaving my center of gravity
over the rails and then having to use both hands to keep the grinder on target and not spinning

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over the ledge. I had worked out my forearms that morningbad idea when Id need my gripping
power to keep the grinder inline, so I decided to leave it up to Cody to put in the finishing
touches. Kneeling was my forte, so I went back to the lower railing, the only problem was that
those little snippets and shards would fly off into my shins every few seconds. It got so bad I
decided to get to the back of the bars by putting the grinder through a gap in the rails and
maneuvering the grinders blade to buff up the backs of the banister. I decided that it was a good
idea and it saved me from dangling over the rail anymore, but now I had a problemI had no
way of seeing if I actually blasted off all of the rust. I stood up, grinder still spinning, and leaned
over the rail. I couldnt see much so I wiped off my safety-glasses with my left hand for a better
look. In that moment when I held the grinder alone in my right hand and overlooking the
balcony, a gust of wind lifted my baggy blue shirt into the grinders teeth. The grinder wrapped
my shirt in half a second. My left hand instinctively returned to the grinder handle to pull it away
but I could feel it rotate deeper into my shirt and towards me. My thumbs fumbled to turn it off
but the old switch wasnt cooperating. Shawn yelled in the background, I fumbled for the switch,
Shawn tripped over the steps he was running toward me so fast, he sprained his ankle but still
army crawled over to the outlet and ripped it out of the outlet.

I breathed in and exhaled deep. The grinder released its hold of my shirt and I let it fall to
the ground. By then Cody ran from the front yard when he heard the grinder go from full speed
to nothing. I didnt say anything, not even a thanks or that was a close on; none of us did. I
just remember the three of us standing close in the shade of that back porch, each of us breathing
in, nodding our heads, and stare at different cracks in the cement. We stayed like that for a
minute or twosilent, still. My boss, Shawn, stood himself up and limped over to me and the
grinder. He looked at me and checked my shirt. It was torn, but the shirt wrapped in the saw so

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tight that it never got to my body. He nodded, stooped down and picked up the grinder and then
said, Ok, keep going.

What?! I thought. Wasnt I going to get the rest of the day off? I had no desire to ever
touch that grinder again, let alone hold it when it was turn on. Maybe that is the part that scared
me the mostnot my near-eviscerationbut having to pick the grinder back up and continue.
The terror wasnt over. Before it ripped through my shirt I had only gone one-forth of the way
down the porch banister, and the remainder now stretched out like deaths row. I trembled. My
forearms were sore for holding on so tight for lifesomething I have good practice with. Mother
says whenever I was fed as a baby I would grab hold of her wrist as tight as I could. Now that I
was under threat of leaving this world I did the same thing that I did when I entered it: I held on
and cried. I guess you could call me a baby for crying just for having to pick up a piece of
equipment, the power tool was full of powerful questions I couldnt escape: Would I get hurt
again? Worse next time? Would they send me to the hospital or the mortuary?

The most memorable and haunting part of the Corpus Christi Clock for me was when it
struck a new hour. Every hour on the hour instead of chiming bells like any other clock, a
hammer hidden within the clock would pound a wooden plank as if hammering in the nails to
your coffin. The macabre mallet bidding farewell to another hour of life was complimented with
synchronized chains rattling in the background. I am not on death row but the mallet hammered
my young heart with the realization that there was no escaping for me. Maybe I am on death row,
but dont realize it. Maybe it will decades, maybe tomorrow, maybe today. In all these
uncertainties there was one operating certainty, there was escaping the Chronophage.

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I went back rubbing down the pole, but this time I was crying; the silent kind, without
tearsjust that shaking, that heaving desperation. This thing is going to eat me, I whimpered
each time I snagged a right edge too close and the beast lurched at my stomach again. Catching
the grinder in my shirt that day stopped time; and maybe I was acting like a baby, but part of me
believes I became a man that day. The grinder got heavier in my hand and continued to growl,
but I picked it up, determined to finish my work. It takes a strong man, to pick up the
unpredictable saw of time, instrument of his death, and march towards his end.