Grandfather clock

I don't remember when I first heard the old song about "grandfather's clock" but I was still a child and I've never forgotten it. I can remember my grandmother singing it to me as she worked.

"My grandfather's clock was too tall for the shelf, so it stood ninety years on the floor."

I always thought it would have been fun to have a "real" grandfather's clock, one of the tall ones, but his was a shelf clock. I don't ever remember it not being there, on a shelf my grandfather had made himself, first at the ranch and then at their house in town after they retired. It struck the hour and half hour with a pleasant chime that I always associated with "home".

It was always my grandfather that wound it, it wasn't something that grandmother ever did as far as I can recall. When I was little, I loved to sit at the kitchen chair and watch as he carefully stopped the pendulum, lifted it down from the shelf and then sat down, with the key, to wind it. The last few turns were always done with extra care, then the key would go back in the case, the clock would be replaced on the shelf and the pendulum restarted.

The clock went with them when they retired and I have a very clear memory of the first Christmas at their house in town. My parents and I came the night before because the weather was bad and the roads difficult. I slept on the couch in the living room and although I was 12 I was still enough of a child to be anxious for Christmas morning. I remember listening to the tick-tock of the clock and listening as it chimed off the night hours, wondering just how early I could get up.

The last stanza ends: "But it stopped, short, never to go again, when the old man died."

I can remember being uncomfortable with this, though death to me at 6 or 8 years of age was something I didn't really understand. In my teens I was more aware but busy with my own concerns and my own life.

My grandfather died of a heart attack when he was in his late 80s, when I was in my early 20s, married and living in Las Vegas, with two small children. When I returned to live there again, after 12 years away, my grandmother was no longer living alone in the house, but had moved to a smaller apartment.

The clock was still on the shelf grandfather had made for it, in the small sitting room, and I can remember grandmother carefully dusting it as she dusted the other shelves. But the clock was no longer working and I can remember her saying "I just don't know what's wrong with it. Bert was always the one that took care of it and I just don't seem to be able to."

It ran through my mind, instantly, along with quick tears that I had not shed years earlier, at his death. "But it stopped, short, never to go again, when the old man died."

Horse accidents

Fortunately for me, Dad was fairly mellow about the possibility of horse accidents. Being raised on a cattle ranch, he grew up riding and driving horses and had his share of the usual accidents. He knew they could happen but my only restriction after I was 10 or 12 years old was that I had to tell someone which direction I was riding and I had to be back before sundown.

Dad's worst accident happened when he was in his teens and driving the Hambletonian stallion the ranch had from the government Remount Service. He was hitched to a buggy, going back to the ranch from town. The stallion was not particularly reliable, spooked and ran, dumping the buggy, and my father, into a barbed wire fence. My father had the scar across the bridge of his nose, under both eyes, where one of the barbed wire strands cut him.

The only real issue he had with horses was the possibility of being dragged by a horse. I wasn't allowed to ride with a saddle until I was about 10 years old, and had grown enough to fit one of the saddles. Even then, he took that saddle and had covered stirrups made so my foot could not go all the way through the stirrup. He told me many times about hearing stories of people getting hung up in a stirrup and killed.

He had also seen one man killed when he was working with the road crew before he married my mother. Road work was still being done with horse teams at the time, in the mid to late 30s, heavy equipment pulled by teams of 12 to 16 head of draft horses. One of the drovers was unhooking a team. The horses spooked and the trace chain whipped and caught him around the legs. Open country at the time, nobody there with a saddle horse to catch them and he was killed.

Ironically, as an adult, I saw a girl killed by being dragged, at a riding stable in Spain. An inexperienced rider, she got out of the arena where she had been, the horse started trotting to catch up to some others. She fell off, her foot went through the stirrup and of course the horse spooked and ran back to the stable.

I had accidents, some of which I never told my parents about, but although I can think of half a dozen times I should have been seriously injured, if not killed, I was lucky and never had a broken bone or an injury that required a doctor's attention until I was in my mid-20s. Then it was a badly wrenched ankle caused, embarassingly enough, by the pony I had for the children, although after a number of X-rays the doctor announced that although nothing seemed to be where it should be in my ankle and foot, he couldn't see anything broken.

Broken ribs in my late 30s convinced me maybe I should quit training unbroke horses but I avoided serious injuries until I was in my 60s, when the law of averages did finally catch up to me, although I still have horses.