Thursday, July 13, 2006
Tick Tock I
I guess I should write about the grandfather clock before the night blooming cereus eats it.
This clock was in my mother’s family for some undetermined number of years – I did a little bit of research in clock books and found that similarly designed clocks were built in the North of England (the ancestral stomping grounds) in the 18th century. So it’s probably got some years on it.
My great-grandparents emigrated to the US in the early 1900’s, and I like to think that the clock, appropriately crated, came with them in the cargo hold of some Cunard liner, thence onto the railroad until it fetched up in Pittsburgh. It has in it a sticker from a cleaning and repair done in the 1930s, and there are a couple of home-made looking repairs probably from the same vintage.
I remember it lurking dimly in the long hallway of the apartment my grandmother shared with her brother and my aunt for many years; my aunt took it with her to a series of apartments after they died. On her death, my brother and I faced the dilemma that every potential inheritor of a grandfather clock faces, roughly summable as “Good God, what am I going to do with that?” Sure, it has priceless family heritage, but it’s tall, heavy, frankly kind of ugly, and located in Pittsburgh.
We were prepared to do the adult thing: we called in an antique guy when we were cleaning out the house and asked him to make an offer. He looked up one side and down the other, peered into the works, and finally decided to take a pass on it.
I suppose at that point we could have hauled it out to the curb or donated it to the Salvation Army (possibly by leaving it on their doorstep at night and driving away fast) but I kept it. After getting quotes on crating and shipping (more than you might think) I rented a minivan, drove from Boston to Pittsburgh and hauled it home.
We think we own objects, but that’s not always the direction of the relationship.
