Wearily sitting on the stone bench beside the kitchen door, grandfather's old pocket watch weighed heavily in my hand. Moments earlier our small cottage had been bulging with neighbors, friends and family members who appear when wedding bells ring or funeral bells toll and soon disappear into the mists of time until such events occur once more. Alas, today was not a marrying day but a burying day instead. It was my dear father who we laid in the ground, God Rest His Soul.

In the days of Old Queen Vic, in the 1870s, grandfather was a coal miner. The Rhondda Valley in Wales was his home; his workplace was in the deep dark shafts far beneath the ground. How well I remember the stalwart fellow in his olden days; how well he liked to describe his golden days. Sitting in the warm corner in the rocking chair nearest the fire, he seemed to me to be aged beyond years. His face wrinkled like a prune; his hair gray; his mouth toothless, he was far from the young man he must have been in the days when coal was King.

I was but a young lad of seven the first time he laid the pocket watch in my open palm. It was a thing of beauty, this prize possession of an old man who had very little in all the days of his life. With a bird in flight etched into the gold cover and his name, Selwin Morgan Davies, inscribed on the back, the old relic was grandfather's pride and joy. Slowly I allowed my fingers to roam across the glossy surface of the timeless timepiece before my thumb depressed the latch to reveal the clock-face with the photo of my Gran on the opposing side. The clock was a bright shining white with Roman numerals dancing around the edges and wee tiny hands pointing to the exact time; Gran, dressed in severe black with an equally severe expression, was grim as only Victorian ladies could be grim.

"This will be yours one day, young laddie," the old man stated as he firmly closed my palm upon the grand old pocket watch. "Your father takes possession of it first and, when he is finished with it, it will be yours. A family heirloom, young lad, that's for sure." In my tender years, I was in awe to believe someday, far and away in the future, the grand old pocket watch would be mine.

Leaning snugly against the leg of his flannel trousers, I watched my grandfather tend and wind his watch. Although it kept perfect time and tick-tocked, as it should, every night the patriarch cared for his timepiece. Every night he rubbed the outer casing with soft cloth until it shone golden and bright in the candlelight. Every night he tucked it away, in safety, beneath his pillow. It was, indeed, a treasured possession in our home.

When the time came when grandfather could no longer enter the dark shafts of the mine, it was my father's turn to take his place. Our family was a family of coal miners just the same as all other families were coal miners. The men worked their shift, day or night. The end of shift found the men tramping home covered in coal from the top of their heads to the toes of their socks. Although they all wore rugged hobnail boots, there was nary a clean sock in the entire town. Mothers and grandmothers kept tubs of hot water in the back kitchens for the men to scrub in before the evening meals. This was life in a coal town in the Rhondda Valley in Wales when coal was King.

I was just entering my tenth year when grandfather put his foot down. "Young Danny," he said, "is not fit for the mines. Young Danny is fit to become a doctor or a lawyer."