When I was between the ages of 8 and 18, I spent an increasingly large amount of time with my grandfather. My mother had begun to work more, meeting the need of a growing family, and my father worked as he always had: a lot.
I listen to my friends tell stories of their relationships with their grandparents, and, of the friends whose grandparents were alive and near enough to them in their youth for a relationship to form, only a few made meaningful connections. Most just missed the opportunity entirely.
For me, that was not the case. My grandfather was my best friend. He knew everything about me, my life, and how I thought. He knew the first time I fell in love before I did, and I knew about the moment he met his wife. Sharing was easy with him. He never pulled me into talking with him. Instead, he opened the room to my thoughts. Seeing as I wasn’t popular at school and didn’t often have plans after it, we would sit on the back porch and share lemonade while I studied. He would not read or play games. Instead, he’d sit, rock slowly, and listen. I would follow the shadow of his tall rocking chair out of the corner of my eye while doing mental math. One step with each sway, I adopted the rhythm of his rocking in the way I think, and when I remember algebra’s order of operations, I say the pneumonic at that tempo. And the way to spell “Mississippi.”
When he’d sit, he’d invariably let his hands fall into the high pockets of his deep blue, cable-knit sweater. Thick and woolen, the navy cloth seemed to grow darker with age, not fade. His hands would hinge at the wrist, elbows touching the arms of the chair, with one thin silver chain draped from the pocket’s corner to his pants.
His pocket watch. You’d think it would be the only rhythm in the room to compete with that of the chair, but I never heard it. Underneath the thick wool, it could not be discerned over the sounds of birds chirping and cars driving by. But, when Grandpa would lift the watch from his pocket to check the time, the clock pronounced a strong, deep tick. I, deep in a calculation or essay, would visibly shudder at the sound of the watch’s tick, the watch having been pulled from the pocket not one second prior. It would startle me, grandpa would check the time, and pocket the watch again. For years, we would joke that “no one knows what happens to the watch once it goes into the pocket.” We can’t hear it. Does it turn into something else? A flower? A magic marker? A pipe? In those early years, we would play that it explores being other things, before reliably reverting to watch form for grandpa to withdraw. After all, we couldn’t hear it continue to tick, so who knows?
What do you think happened to the watch when it was in my grandfather’s pocket?
I remember one of my favorite answers of his.
“When it’s in my pocket, I think it stops. I think it stops, and sits and does absolutely nothing, just still. Cooling off. And when I reach my hand down there, and it feels my warm flesh lump getting closer, fingers twisting all around, I think it winds itself up and pushes those hands as hard and as fast as it needs to, so that by the time I see it in front of me, it’s back to the right time.”
The chair’s shadow rocked, and a sharp tick cut the air as he pulled the watch from his pocket. Out of the pocket, it was a watch. Inside the pocket, it was anything.
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