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."