In my childhood and teenage bedroom, the head of the bed sat about a foot away from the wall. That empty space left just enough clearance so the single shelf above the headboard didn’t hit my skull when I woke up every morning. It also left room for the red spring arm reading lamp to move in and out of position as needed.
On that small shelf perched above my pillow there were always two things. One was the book I was reading. The other was the digital solid-state alarm clock radio. It was an inch-high brick of silver gray plastic, with a round radio dial on the right side. It has red eight segment LED numerals. It was purchased at the Service Merchandise on Wolf Road. I surmise that I got it in ‘82 or ‘83, because Jim moved out of our shared bedroom into his own so he could have teenage privacy. Prior to that we both woke up to his alarm clock radio. It was cigar-box sized, of brown plastic . The digits were yellow green.
Every night, I would set the timer to about 30 minutes, and listen to the radio as I fell asleep. I can’t remember what stations were cool back then. That clock woke me up every weekday through high-school. One Saturday night, in high school I laid on the bed, and listened to Madonna sing “Crazy for You”, and feeling incredibly sad and alone.
My alarm clock got removed from it’s shelf in the fall of 1988 and went to college with me, where it spent two years on a little two drawer filing cabinet that acted as my bedside table in Champlain Hall, when I lived with Steven Rubenstein. It has sat its nightly sentry perched on a milk crate next to a pile of blankets (late college), and on a rough beam in a horse barn stall in Maryland.
It woke me up for classes I got A’s in, and for an eight AM differential equation math class I barely passed. It has woke me up to teach classes, and to round on surgeries. It was my bedside alarm clock until Into the 21st-century, when it was replaced with a CD player/alarm clock, in the brief era that preceded the iPod.
Early one Saturday morning, when I was almost twice as old as that lonely boy listening to Madonna, it woke me up to begin the day I got married.