KEEPNG TIME
There are many ways of keeping time.
A favorite way is to pat our foot tapping lightly on the floor when a popular tune is being played.. We have, obediently, changed our clocks each Spring and Fall but not any more That set chore has been taken over by a radio transmitter located in Colorado which keeps our clocks set and re-set as needed. We all pay attention to time.
My concern with time began I'd say rather early, when I was about to become nine years of age. If I had to put a date on it. I would set it as having taken place in mid-January 1924.
My older brother Al and I had received identical gifts that Christmas from our parents we often did in those Depression years. They had given each of us a bright, new, ticking pocket watch.. We were both proud of the fact that we owned , as personal property, fine, new INGERSOL watches and in the famed ”Buck”:model which I was later told was called that because it sold for one dollar. I don't know that to be a fact, but it would have been in keeping with budgets of those days. .We both thought of our watches baa being cut-down versions of London's “Big Ben” himself.
For the first time in our lives we had time at hand ,and it was a good,, grown-up sort of feeling, too/ We consulted them frequently and told everyone what time of day or night it was, even if they were not concerned about it all. One afternoon ,when Al was taking a nap, I chanced upon his watch where had placed it for safekeeping on Mom;s cloth covered ironing board. In those days a “Buck” style pocket watch could be heard ticking away at a distance of several feet.
A mere touch of the tip of the smallest blade of my pocket knife caused the back cover to snap off and to fall gently to the ironing board cover. That revealed to me a wonderful maze of clock works! More discovery! Then. when I slanted the case a but two small parts fell out and I knew I was in dee[ trouble/ I had no idea how to replace them. I put everything down and let the room.
I found refuge on the front porch sitting on the wooden swing . The rest of that hour was the longest period of time I have ever known in all my lifetime. I awaited my fate and I knew my time had come when I heard my mother's voice booming from deep within the house, She spoke my name. That's all.. But she said. my full name and each part of it with equal emphasis, which is always a bad omen, and she made use of that special tone of voice, available only to mothers when calling their children to task which reaches out and demand ,
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` My punishment. I had to give my watch to my brother. Mother brokered the actual exchange and said we were never to speak of the subject edver again. It was not something we could be proud of having in the family, It did show,she said we each had a bad streak of selfishness we ought to get rid of if we wanted to live worthy lives.
I have often wondered why I did not simply leave my watch on the ironing board; take the pieces of the other one and lose them somewhere and saved a lot of trouble ,but if I had done it that way, we would not have found out about this the selfishness thing,, would we?
Mothers work in wondrous ways.
A.L.M. April 6, 2004 [c631wds]
