Grandmother Clock (Cherry)

"After I completed the nightstand I bought a lot of good cherry wood plus a set of plans for an enormous hutch for Zan. It was a really ambitious piece of furniture. I started it by cutting several pieces of cherry to the correct dimensions. On the night of March 15, 1984 I came back from the voc school class and sat with Zan on her bed, talking about the hutch and what I had done with it that evening in the class. She listened, asked questions, was very peaceful, and smiled a lot, her eyes as luminous as ever. She died around 4 o’clock the next morning."

"After the initial shock of her death began to diminish I decided to do some cabinetmaking, instinctively realizing it would be a means of solace. I had all that great cherry wood for the hutch, but by then I understood that the design was much too big and heavy for that Sudbury house. My thoughts went back to building a tall clock. I bought a set of plans for a grandmother clock and began making it, although I felt a little guilty about it being a clock instead of a hutch."

"I wanted a stained glass door for the clock so I took a course in leaded glass at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. The instructor told each of us in the class to make an original drawing measuring about 14” x 12” suitable for creating into a leaded glass piece of art. I told him I only wanted to make a simple door for my clock. He wouldn’t let me. He said after I made the original drawing piece the clock door would be a piece of cake. So I drew a Greek monastery in memory of Zan’s love for all things Greek (following her first trip there in 1973), the instructor approved the design, and I made it of stained glass as a window hanging. The instructor was correct about the clock door because it turned out to be one of the easiest parts when building that grandmother clock."

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