The main chest of drawers or display cabinet, rather – for it was in the dining room of the house on Cayuga Street where our family had moved in 1958 – the main chest of drawers held my grandfather’s black Mantel Clock; as it would be described: a long, dark wooden clock, the turn-of-the-century type, as I recall, with two cabinets below it that held the rugs, bedding, and the like, for the dining room table. On top of the long stretched out chest of drawers, there was a section for my mother’s things or at least that’s where her keys and other items ended up every day after work, so she could grab them quickly in the morning while she hurried home. the stockyards at South Saint Paul, Minnesota, about thirteen miles away; and then, there, right in the middle of the cabinet [cupboard] it was the old wooden clock from the turn of the century, black with pillars on it. Black as black can be: glossy black. It looked like it had a porcelain face, and it might have said ‘Made by Seth Thomas’ (as I recall), on the face of the watch. As one walked through the kitchen, to get to the living room by crossing the dining room, it was to the left (by the grandfather’s forbidden area), with a mirror fitted to the wall just above the clock, you could see the dining room table. if you stood right in front of it, and its six wooden chairs.
It was an eight day clock; It is classified into the half hour and the hour. Grandpa would wind it up from time to time, no one else dared touch it. The Old Russia Bear, had it there for as long as I can remember; my grandmother who had never seen us guys, my brother and I, she died in 1933, she died at the age of 33, she died of double pneumonia, her photo was next to the clock, on the right side of it, for the south.
There was also a cigar box full of coins near the clock, mostly pennies, but other coins as well; –and I liked to check dates, saved pennies, old pennies back then. I always wished I could find the 1909 S VDB penny, boy what a prize that would have been, but I would have to wait 45 years and then buy one for $800 bucks. I once got a 1914 penny and someone said the ‘D’ had been cut off so it wasn’t worth a penny; My luck. I never had much luck to speak of, just a lot of good opportunities in life, so I didn’t count on luck for much, if any. But my grandfather would let me check the pennies, from time to time during my formative years, and when I got older too, I would end up buying a black mantel clock (just like that penny), eventually sending my son a black mantel clock that lived to several states from me (Cody, in Columbus, Ohio). It’s funny how we absorb life’s little idiosyncrasies; most of the time we pick up and live our childhood maybe on the side, after our childhood is long gone; what we couldn’t do then, we fix now (not a bad thing or a good thing, just something we do). But it was nice that he thought of me; all for a watch and a box of pennies, we both found things to talk about, and he didn’t talk much.