Ode to the SPARTUS

The alarm clock on the night table beside our bed,

Cristie had before she met me in college in the late 1980s.

It's called "SPARTUS" and it has wood paneling on the sides and the top.

(A nod to a bygone age when alarm clocks were carved out of wood?)

The SPARTUS appears to have been designed by the same stylist who built the AMC Gremlin.

It boasts a "Battery Reserve" (which we've never had to use, Thank God),

And there's a button that says, "Snoozer/Battery Tester";

The button is loose, from all the pounding; and the "Batt Low" light has been on since the first Bush presidency.

The SPARTUS is dirty, as if some of the years of dust has soaked into the plastic.

Its tone is at once tired and harsh, wheezy and sharp, old and unsentimental.

I hate it some mornings and think, "Maybe in the last quarter century,

alarm-clock engineers have found a pleasanter sound."

("You probably wouldn't like any alarm sound," Cristie says.)

But the SPARTUS has sounded the keynote to many happy early-morning golf days and some butterfly-stomached pre-dawn departures and a number of family vacations.

Some mornings I roll over look at the SPARTUS and casually muse, and I imagine Cristie does too,

"How long are we going to have this old thing?"

Until it stops waking us up, I figure.

Comments

[Glynn]

We have a GE refrigerator in our basement. We bought it in 1977 with our first official house. It's survived three moves and two boys (now grown). It's still going strong.

[Cynthia]

My Spartus is also my oldest appliance. But it has even fewer "bells and whistles" than yours - a battery reserve but no battery tester. I only just replaced my 25 year old 13 inch TV with a 32 inch flat screen. But other than myself, I think those are the oldest things in my apartment.

[David Murray]

Oh Cynthia. A battery with no tester. You poor, poor woman.

[Jason]

I used to have a Spartus clock, too! If I recall correctly, I hit it too hard while snoozing one morning, and Spartus no more.

[Bill Peden]

I have that same clock. It has been waking me up for over twenty five years and is still going strong. I do use the battery back up, it comes in handy when the power fails.