Clock-radio

Clock-radio has been with me through good times and bad. I bought it for my daughter Beth, who was hard to get up in the morning, but she’s moved on, electronically. I repossessed it when the alarm on mine failed. It can be hoarse and occasionally eavesdrops on the police, but is otherwise reliable.

It’s constantly tuned to RNZ National and set to come on just before the six o’clock news in the morning. Sometimes I forget to set it and it defaults to the midnight alarm. I reach out and blindly stab at the row of buttons on the top. The off button is the only one with a notch in it. How many years did it take me to work that one out? When you turn the power off and on again, the clock flashes until you set the time. I try to fool myself by making it 10 minutes fast. The stove clock, the car clock, and my mobile phone are all on different times. My time is relative and requires nimble arithmetic.

Clock-radio’s mains plug is smaller than most and has just two pins. Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t need as much power. I am incredibly ignorant about the practical side of electricity for someone who majored in physics. I’m still not sure how radios pick up the waves from the air and translate them back into sound. A bigger mystery to me is how the brain interprets them. Sound is all in our imagination.

I do know that radio waves are the same as light waves, only much, much longer. Microwaves fall between radio and visible light waves on the spectrum. The background radiation from the birth of our universe is microwave length, at around 1mm. While it won’t cook you, it’s a nuisance, causing the white noise on your television; a small price to pay for the creation of the universe, I guess. When the radiation stops, so do we…

http://turbinekapohau.org.nz/2018-contents-nonfiction-glenda-lewis/