"Germans can't brag about much, but we do have the world's biggest cuckoo clock" ~Great-Grandpa

I am tinkering away on a new story in honor of my great-grandpa. I plan to share it here, bit by bit as I write it. I hope you enjoy it.

Clocks have personalities. Not just any clock. Not the modern clocks with their lifeless faces and soulless ticking as they are powered by batteries. Those clocks were dead, as dead as the art of understanding the joy, the delight, the comradery shared in winding a clock run by gears.

The old man knew this. He had known it for nearly his whole life, from the moment he was a tiny boy and held his father’s antique pocket watch for the first time. The watch ticked with life as he watched the gears move in time – how very different from the dead, battery run wristwatch he had been given when he’d turned four.

That watch was dead. But the pocket watch, it moved with a life he could only explain as magical.

He fell in love with gears. He fell in love with the rhythm of the ticking. It was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room that soothed him to sleep at night. He tried to recreate the same sound when the grandfather clock had to go in for repairs by putting his brothers alarm clock by his bed.

It sounded dead. Off-beat. And to add to it, his brother had lied and left the alarm on, so it brutally jolted him awake at four in the morning.

Since he was up anyway, he filled a glass with cold water and threw it on his sleeping brother.

That’s the way with siblings, with brothers. To let one have the last laugh is a sign of weakness.

But that event changed his life. When the grandfather clock returned, ticking as a clock should, he knew he had to learn how to repair them himself. He could not live in a house with lifeless clocks – especially when they felt the need to scream in his ear and rattle his teeth at four in the morning.

He became good at what he did. He knew the clocks, on a level most in the village found to be bordering creepy. If he were a girl, they would have probably called him a witch. Instead, they passed in him the streets and wouldn’t make eye contact, and when children walked by his home they stared and whispered together about the crazy old clock maker who talked to his clocks.

He had good hearing. He heard every word.

He also wouldn’t deny it. He did talk to the clocks. And he gave them names. He also had favorites.

(Don’t tell the others).

He repaired clocks for the village, and he talked to those clocks as well. And no one complained then because he always repaired every clock he was given.

They only called him crazy when he didn’t have their great-great-great grandmother’s heirloom clock on his worktable.

Maybe they were afraid the crazy would show through and cause him to smash the clock.

Little did they know he would sooner smash his own hand.

Disturbing, yes. But his hand would heal.

A shattered clock, wood splintered into bits?

No, he couldn’t think of that. He would start to cry. Also, he would have a nightmare of it happening and not sleep for a week.

What kind of monster smashes a clock?

No, when he repaired someone’s clock, they were always nice to him. Extra nice. They would bring him good German beer and pastries and the woman down the lane with the 1873 E. Ingraham clock that she kept winding too tight and bringing to him in a panic because her mother had given her the clock and she would be devastated if it broke and never worked again as it was all she had to remember her mother by would bring him fudge.

Homemade fudge.

Without the distracting nuts.

He really wished she would not strong arm the clock, but he did like the fudge.

As for himself, he had countless clocks in his home. Some thought it was too loud and covered their ears when they walked in.

But what did they know?

Besides, it was his home. If he wanted to adopt all the abandoned, unloved, and orphaned clocks of the world and give them a home who were they to say he shouldn’t?

Neighbors could be annoying sometimes.

It wasn’t as if they had to spend two hours in the morning winding and checking on each one.

He loved all clocks. (All live ones. He didn’t count the dead ones as even being clocks. Those battery monsters were alien to him). He did love Black Forest German cuckoo clocks the best. (Sh, cover the other clocks so they don’t hear this. Never fear though, he showed each clock the same kind of love).

His love for the cuckoo clocks came from the fact he was German, lived in the Black Forest region, and – if one was honest, they would say that the Swiss had better chocolate and even the German beer could be outdone. But who could make better cuckoo clocks? That’s right, no one. And he lived in the village with the world’s biggest Black Forest cuckoo clock.

He owned many such clocks, but he had five of especial fondness.

The first, and his eldest of the Black Forest, was a larger clock who bore the name Clyde. Clyde was faithful, rarely faltered, and he showed the depths of his love for others in the fact that not only did he cuckoo but he also played music. His deep color and colorful dancing figures showed that grandfatherly side of him. He bore the proud carvings of deer relaxing under a tree. Some large clocks included a hunter, but not Clyde. No, he wanted to share the wonders of nature. Sometimes it is okay to sit and enjoy nature for what it is without thinking of dinner. But Clyde was elderly. He worked hard. So sometimes he needed a break, and he would take it. He would always tick, always cuckoo, but sometimes the music box and dancing figures would stop for no reason. The clock maker would examine Clyde, and nothing was ever out of place. So, he would turn the music off for a week or so, turn it back on, and Clyde would sing again.

Even the best and most faithful of grandfathers need small breaks.