The Clock Man

The antique "eight-day" clock pictured above was given to me by a very dear friend a few decades ago after I helped him negotiate a business transaction. When I picked it up, I brought it home, plunked it on a table, and set the pendulum to swinging. My kids thought the hour chime was loud and annoying, so I stopped it and just let it sit as a conversation piece (though I can't recall anyone ever remarking on it).

When I moved to Mt. Baldy, I started it up again, but it never quite kept good time, and it seemed to have some other issues as well, so finally, after I became a flatlander again, I had it looked at by a man my neighbor recommended. He was a nice guy, but admitted up front he was just learning the clock repair trade. He took it home, did a bunch of repair and replacement on it, charged me a hundred bucks, and set it to ticking again. When he did, he pointed out that the flag painted on the bottom glass pane had 32 stars. "I was trying to determine how old the clock is," he told me. "If the flag is any indication, this clock was made in the mid-1800's." Oh. Wow....

A month or so later, it stopped working again, which I believe was my fault. While winding it one day, Purrl distracted me, and I wound it too tight. (Wait--then I guess we can blame it on Purrl, can't we? I should have thought of that. It's always the cat's fault.) Anyway, from time to time I would start it ticking. It would go for a few hours or a day, then stop. When I moved here to Calimesa, I found a safe place for it, then just basically forgot about it until I saw someone ask on social media for the name of a local clock repair person. The same name appeared repeatedly, so I wrote down the name and number and finally got around to calling.

"Dan" came out on Sunday. There is something fascinating about watching someone who is really good at what they do. They kind of enter a zone and become fixated. This is what Dan did immediately upon seeing my clock. He also noted (since I had set the pendulum to swinging hours before he arrived and it was still going) that the "tock" was "off." At that point, he hadn't even touched it, just sat on the floor listening to it. "Well, I can tell you right off the bat, it's not ticking correctly," he said. "Hear it?"

Um... no.

But when he reached inside and quickly adjusted some thingamajig in the workings, I did hear the difference right away; it sounded more like a classic ticktock. He checked a few more parts and pieces, and as he did I asked him how he'd gotten started repairing clocks. Turns out that while he was in the Air Force, he was stationed in Germany, where he learned to appreciate the intricacy and beauty of fine clocks and watches. He brought several home with him and decided he should get some tools and learn how to repair them himself. He found someone who happened to be retiring from the trade and agreed to sell him some tools and teach him a few things, and he has continued to learn along the way. When he began repairing clocks in 1993, there were eleven such clock repairmen in a thirty-mile radius of where he lives in Redlands. Now there are three.

"No one wants to do it," he told me. "Younger people aren't interested in old clocks. I have three antique grandfather clocks that were given to me by people who were going to throw them away because they just didn't want them in their houses anymore."

Seriously?

I love my clock. There is something comforting about the constant sound of the old school ticktock. When you consider that this clock works entirely on a few brilliantly designed gears, two weights, and a pendulum, that's pretty impressive. And when I further consider that this instrument has been ticking away (minus a couple of years on hiatus) for 160 years or so, that's just downright amazing.

Dan was here for less than an hour. "It seems fine now," he said, as he made his way to the door, giving me directions along the way on how to correct the pendulum if it runs too fast or too slow over time. He also instructed me on how to velcro it to a wall in the event we have a big earthquake. And then he tried to get away without letting me pay him. "I didn't really do anything," he protested. In the end, because I kept shoving money at him, he did take a few bucks for the gas required to drive the 15 miles from Redlands. He left his card and told me to call right away if the clock stops again. But it's been ticktocking away for 72 hours now, bonging its bong on the hour without fail. And this song has been running through my head for days: "My Grandfather's Clock." (This version on YouTube is a charming one by Doc Watson, though there are many. I've known it nearly all my life as we learned it as a folk song in elementary school.) 

Sears

(Photo is from the archive of the Herald-Dispatch newspaper in Huntington, West Virginia)

The iconic retail giant, Sears, has filed for bankruptcy and will be closing 142 stores. This doesn't mean the end of the vast historic marketplace... yet... but this could be the beginning of the end... which I will mark with great sadness. After all, Sears did give us a pony.

Back in the early 1960's, our local Sears used to sponsor a contest in which children were invited to write, in "fifty words or less," (exactly the number of words in my first paragraph) why they wanted a pony. My sister entered the contest in 1963, but didn't win (despite my fervent prayers). That same year, our father died. So when she entered again the following year, she included this in her plea:

All my life my father promised me he would buy me a pony. He died before he could fulfill that promise.

And she won. Pictured below is my sister, Peggy, and the representative from Sears who presented her with a bridle, a saddle, and a pony—actually two, because the little mare we were given was in foal and would later give birth to a fine young colt.

Peg is in the saddle, and I'm the smiling geek in the blue shorts. That's Mom, of course, looking fashionable as always, and our next-door-neighbor (looking jealous). I apologize for the quality of this photo; we had it stuck on the wall in the tack room for years.

Our pony, a purebred Shetland, was named Silver Lady Sensation on her registration papers. We called her Silver. I say "we" because the colt she gave birth to was later traded for a full size horse for my sister, so the pony was passed down to me. Like a big dog, she was my boon companion from the time I was ten until I was twenty-six.

Me, a tiny ten-year-old, with one of the best friends a girl could have, in our back yard.

The truth is, having her changed all our lives.

We probably would have continued to live on Eberle Street in our little Lakewood housing tract if Peg hadn't won the contest. But clearly you can't keep a pony in your back yard, so she had to be boarded at the nearby stable... which was a financial burden to our mother, who had become the sole breadwinner even before my father's death from a rare disease. Mom decided to put our childhood home up for sale, and she found an affordable house a few miles away in a residential area that was zoned for agriculture, so we had a barn and corral in the back yard. Right next door lived the man who would later become my wicked step-father....

In the meantime, Peg and I grew up immersed in the horsey life, getting up early to feed before we went to school, coming home to ride the horses, brush them, feed them, clean stalls and all the other work required in caring for them. On the weekends, we participated in horseshows, winning our share of trophies and ribbons over the years. While other teenagers we knew were off getting into mischief after school, we were horseback riding or grooming or getting ready for the next show, which didn't leave much time to be naughty.

Later, when I married, I told my husband our first home would have to be one with horse property as I would be bringing Silver along with me. He consented—because he had no choice, keeping Silver being a deal breaker and all—and we bought a little three-bedroom home in Mira Loma (now Jurupa Valley) where Silver became companion to my children as they grew, or at least three of them; she died before my youngest was born.

Nowadays I doubt that Sears or any other big chain has an annual contest, and if they do, I'm sure they're not giving away ponies. But that era, in the late 1950's and early 1960's, was a different time altogether. You could buy just about anything at Sears, from clothing and housewares to tools and building supplies, including a house, if you were willing to assemble it after you ordered it. We loved getting the Sears catalog in the mail, that huge tome of slick paper with color pictures of all the toys and bikes and games a kid could ever dream of—including, of course, BB guns and, for the older kid, hunting rifles and other sporting goods.

I imagine in the days to come we'll be hearing a lot of stories about what Sears meant to folks of a certain age. Don't know if anyone else can top our pony story, though.

Getting Ink

2016 was a year that was chock-full of truly awful events, the worst of which was the death—by suicide—of my goofy, sweet, troubled friend John. On and off throughout his life, John had battled with depression, self-medicating along the way, getting clean and sober, doing battle again, and on and on. Later in his life, he began to deal with multiple health issues; he quit smoking to get healthy, only to gain enough weight to put increased stress on his heart and lungs. Over the years, he was in and out of relationships. When he took his life, he had been single for some time. “He was just so lonely,” his sister told me later. I had spent time with John in the months prior to his death… but I never saw it coming—and I am one who truly knows the signs.

Two years before John died, a new young friend, Michael, also took his life. I had met him through a writing event that he had put together for other young people, a contest for high school students to help them exhibit their writing and, in the long run, gain confidence in their writing skills. At one of the preparatory events, his father mentioned to me as an aside that writing had been the one stabilizing factor in Michael’s life. “He’s always had difficulty in school fitting in,” his father said. This resonated with me. As a depressed child, I could sit with a pencil and notebook and simply write whatever came to mind. It anchored me, gave me purpose and a sense that I could do something not everyone could do. Robert Frost referred to the act of writing verse as “a momentary stay against confusion.” When I read that for the first time, I was in college, and the idea resonated with me so strongly, it made my heart pound. My journals, kept over the decades since my children were young, contain many pages that were filled on days when I was too sad to function. The act of writing down my thoughts was often enough to calm me, to help organize the chaos and confusion in my head. Setting the emotions carefully down on paper helped me distance myself from them and find resolution to some of the factors contributing to that chaos.

I’ve been alone for a very long time now. I understand loneliness, especially as an older person. I also understand isolation, that feeling of not fitting in, of not finding a tribe to belong to, and of needing to pour onto paper the words that seemed locked away otherwise. And I fully understand the need to make the mental anguish and emotional pain stop. In my life, there have been times when I questioned why I was even continuing to go forward. What’s the point? I often wondered. Of course, intellectually, I understand what “the point” is; it’s my children. It’s my family. Now, it is putting words on a page that just may resonate with someone else, help them heal or laugh or cry or feel less alone. I understand my gift, and what I am to do with it. I doubt that I will feel suicidal again in my life.

But… just as a reminder… and to honor the lives of Michael and John (because I miss their light in this world), I have gotten my first tattoo. It’s a semi-colon. If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see it there on my right wrist, a reminder daily that yes, sometimes our life story needs a “pause.” But it will continue. Life sometimes hurts like a slap in the face from a trusted friend. It’s shocking and it stings and we wonder in the moment how we will recover. But we can. If we wait a bit, things do get better. The pain does ease enough to be tolerable. With time, it’s possible to see beauty in the world again.

When Chris (Christopher Lloyd Davis of Reflect Tattoo Studio in Redlands, California—a former band nerd and beautiful human being) was situating the tattoo on my arm, he said, “I can move it down further so you can cover it if you need to.”

“No,” I told him, “I’m never going to want to cover this up. I want to see it every day. And I want everyone else to see it as well.”

So now the daily reminder is there.

If you have been previously unaware that a semi-colon tattoo is generally done to honor someone who has taken his or her own life, I encourage you to use your search engine to look at images of semi-colon tattoos. Most are far more beautiful than mine, but mine is serving its purpose just fine.

TheNational Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. If you’ve ever had one of those days (or as I used to say, “one of those lives”), jot that down and stick it somewhere safe. Sometimes we just need another voice to reassure us that the pain will ease, things will get better. A pause is fine before going forward once again.