The Watch

It was a great Christmas.  Lee and I got everything we asked for, and more.

 
The extended family had gathered on Christmas Eve to open gifts.  Aunty Mit and Uncle Bob,  our cousin Emile and his wife Elsie, and Grandma.  Dad fixed eggnog for everyone, and Mom set out the plates of Christmas Cookies she  spent the past week making.  Lee and I were shaking the gifts under the tree making last minute guesses.

I think the wrist watches we got from Grandma were our favorites that year.  They were gold, with gold expansion bands.  They were some sort of symbol or rite of passage.  

We had worn toy watches before.  Tin frames with printed cardboard faces and paper thin imitation leather straps.  But these were real.  You could set the hands and you had to wind them up every morning.  That was a responsibility that came with growing up.  It marked some sort of transition from little kid to big kid status.

The bands were as important as the watches.  Expansion bands were rare.  To have one on a kid's watch was a sign of real class.  Even though they fit rather loosely  (Dad had taken out all the links he could), the bands made Lee and I sophisticated gentlemen.  Rolling the watches around  to the top of our wrists from time to time was a small price to pay for such status.

For the rest of Christmas break we fawned over our watches.  We wore them everywhere.  We wanted to show everyone how grown-up and worldly we were.  We couldn't wait to show our neighborhood friends, and bask in their envy.

Every night  Lee and I would take off our watches and place them under our pillows.  We could almost hear them tick through the stuffing.  We would wake in the morning, take the watches from their safe hiding places,  and smile at each other as we carefully wound them.  We would synchronize the hands as we had seen Robert Ryan and his soldiers do in a recent war movie.  And then the two runt towheads would get dressed and peacock strut from the bedroom to the kitchen where breakfast was waiting.

Christmas break was over.  It was time to go back to school.  Normally I dreaded returning to school after a break, but today was different.  I had a new watch to show off.  I called my friend Rich and told him I wanted to leave early.  I wanted to show off that watch to everyone I could before the first bell rang.

It was also a rare morning for San Francisco.  It was very cold that night.  The temperature fell to freezing.  There was a thin sheet of ice on the pond at the park.

Rich and I walked past the park on our way to school.  We detoured to the pond to witness for ourselves the magic of winter ice.  Snow and ice are something most California kids almost never see.

The ice must have been a quarter of an inch thick.  We knelt by the pond and felt it with our fingers.  We poked at it with sticks, and in the thin spots, the stick would break through the ice into the water.  It was magnificent and magical.

Some of the other school kids arrived and threw rocks out on the ice.  The larger stones would break through the ice and splash.  The smaller ones would rest on top of the ice, spared the final submersion until the sun warmed the pond a few hours later.

Rich and I began to throw the rocks further and further out onto the ice.  Rich was bigger and stronger than I was, and his rocks would always outdistance mine. But the competition had to be met, even when you knew you were going to loose.

I picked up a stone that felt right, wound up my pitch, and let fly as hard as I could.  The satisfaction of a good toss was quickly replaced by a sudden anxious knot deep in my stomach as I felt the expansion band and my watch slip over my hand and saw my treasured symbol of worldliness and status follow the stone in a perfect arc almost to the center of the pond.  

There it lay, glinting in the morning sunlight like a jewel,  resting on the ice right next to the hole made by the stone it had followed.  I started to alternately giggle and cry.  Then the lump in my throat choked off both.  I'm sure a small tear welled up in at least one eye, but my friends were there, and I could not cry.

"It's just a cheap watch," I told them, “no big deal."  But it was a big deal.  My acceptance into the world of big kids and sophistication had just been forfeited.

The worst thing was, I would have to tell Mom.  No, the worst thing was she wouldn't let me con Lee out of his watch.

 

Noel
 

Just how did I know that this was coming... 

...because I've done the same bone-headed thing, although not into a frozen lake. My watch just sank alongside the rock!

Some years later my dad bought me a self-winding Bulova watch. It was a true "man's" watch. I would take it off at night and then wonder the next morning why it had suddenly stopped running overnight!

I didn't realize that the watch relied on a weight that was slung around while wearing it, but by taking it off at night the weight of course was immobile and wasn't "winding" the spring...