Tribute to a Moth

I’d like to pay tribute to a moth that died stuck to the second hand of my clock radio. This was the clock radio that saw me through my days and nights at boarding school quite some time ago. You know, when clocks had hands and dials with numbers. I’m not sure how he got in there. I believe he got into it sometime during a summer when my school stuff was stored in the garage. One September, returning to school for my second year, I unearthed my trusty clock radio and there he was. He wasn’t very big nor was he particularly distinguished, and I don’t know how he got stuck on the second hand. For whatever reason, I didn’t have the heart to try and shake him loose or poke it off with a pencil by jamming it inside the plastic housing of the clock radio, for fear I’d break the whole thing. And so he was stuck there for years thereafter, orbiting the Camay-colored dial each minute; hour after hour, day and night, week after week, month after month. I don’t know why I thought of him recently. It seems as if, for some horrible offense he had committed either in a present or previous incarnation, he was doomed to transit the passage of time like some moth version of Prometheus or Sisyphus, consigned to the eternal torment of going around and around on the sweeping second hand of a clock radio. Daily wake-ups, frantic essay writing, study periods, free time and quiet hours, meals, periods of boredom or frustration, homesickness, forsaken loves – were all measured by my moth. He and the AM radio delivered streams of popular music hits from the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Trogs, Yardbirds, Turtles, Kinks, Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Beach Boys, Jay and the Americans, and yes, Sonny and Cher, later immortalized singing through a clock radio at the same time each morning in the film Groundhog Day. And there were tragedies. It woke me up to the news that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Martin Luther King’s murder, daily tallies of the war dead in Vietnam, endless and vain nuclear disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union, the bombing of Cambodia, marches and demonstrations – I heard it all on my clock radio. A decade flowed past. And all the while the moth circled serenely around the dial. Of course, the moth stopped spinning when I pulled the plug for the last time and went off to college with a new AM/FM clock radio. I suppose that my moth was crushed and buried in its clock radio casket somewhere, and there it rests. Or maybe somebody picked up the radio from the trash can, took it home and plugged it in. Maybe the moth is still there, stuck on the second hand, telling time and telling no stories.