Pendulum Swings

It’s that time of year when I fall asleep at night listening to the crickets. According to The Farmer’s Almanac you can determine the temperature by counting the number of chirps in 14 seconds (I always thought it was 15) and then add 40 (again I was wrong - I had that number at 45).

To accomplish this you need another person to count or have a stopwatch for this scientific experiment. You should also verify your findings with a reliable source – a weather channel or Web site, even a thermometer should do the trick – but by then the whole house is awake and everyone wonders what you are up to when you should be sleeping. Oh yeah - the hotter it is the faster you have to count.

Sometimes it’s too hot to sleep without the air conditioner on. Usually though a fan can do the trick. I like the cool breeze and the dull hum it emits. Growing up in a house without air conditioning meant a fan or two was usually spinning during the summer time.

Mom would have a fan moving the air around so we didn’t choke. We only had two fans (a large floor model that could change your voice when you spoke into it, and a smaller table top model). My sisters got the small one for their room; the other sat in the hallway between the room I shared with my brothers and my parent’s room.

We had the back end of the fan because Mom said it would pull the hot air out of our room. I guess she forgot about the windows being open and all of that hot air just waiting outside to stifle us as it was dragged across our beds. I think that either she wanted Dad to be cooler so he could sleep, or she was trying to amplify our voices with the fan so she could learn all of our secrets. Either way we were hot.

Now when I am having a restless night’s sleep I turn the chime off on the grandfather clock – otherwise my sleep is interrupted four times an hour – or I find myself counting the bells when the clock rings on the hour. As I ponder the pendulum which is kept swinging by gravity’s pull on the weights in the clock I think of Isaac Newton (not really – but humor me).

Newton was the guy who thought of gravity when he observed an apple fall from a tree (or being dropped on his head if you prefer the cartoon version). He also developed his three laws of motion. Maybe Newton was also kept awake by a clock.

In his book “Inventions and Discoveries,” Rodney Carlisle wrote that Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch mathematician, “…had published a study of the pendulum clock … upon which Newton later formulated the complete laws of motion.” Newton’s Third Law of Motion states: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

On October 30th, 2008 just a few days before he was elected President, Sen. Barack Obama said at Missouri University in Columbia. “We are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Missouri is “The show-me state,” and President Obama has showed Missouri and the rest of the country that he does indeed mean to change our country.

But when things are pushed too far, the pendulum swings back the other way hard and fast. I think this is what is happening in this country. The citizens are sensing that things are getting out of balance and are pushing back. It’s time.