Theme Week # 11
Holding it in my hand, I imagine it on his wrist.
The first thing he did when he came into the kitchen was put that cheap watch on. I tried many times over the years to get him to wear a different one but those "attempts" sat in cases on the shelf below his snack bar.
The cracks of the band are dirty with crumbs.
He sat in his recliner, and I on the fold out couch. I can still see his hand buried in the bottom of that cereal box; tossing back Cinnamon Life and only half making it in his mouth. Loud crunching, Andy Rooney in the background, and the pages of my Readers Digest turning were common sounds of our evenings together.
Sliding the watch over my digits and down to my wrist I remember how strange it was to seem him put it on.
"It fell off from sucking it too much." We believed him until we grew up and discovered his thumb was really shot off in the war.
Familiar as his three piece suit, tilted hat, and London Fog jackets; he was never without his Timex.
It was hard to let him go that day. I stared at him, afraid to blink. People walked around me but I didn't care. I knew when I walked away, he would be gone forever. His hands were crossed just above his waist. The way he held them when he walked to the alter to accept communinion. He was wearing his Timex. Apologizing,I took it from his wrist. The same watch I hated to see him wear was all I had left of him.
I kissed the face of the watch, put it back in the box, and placed it on the shelf just below the island in my kitchen.
The first thing he did when he came into the kitchen was put that cheap watch on. I tried many times over the years to get him to wear a different one but those "attempts" sat in cases on the shelf below his snack bar.
The cracks of the band are dirty with crumbs.
He sat in his recliner, and I on the fold out couch. I can still see his hand buried in the bottom of that cereal box; tossing back Cinnamon Life and only half making it in his mouth. Loud crunching, Andy Rooney in the background, and the pages of my Readers Digest turning were common sounds of our evenings together.
Sliding the watch over my digits and down to my wrist I remember how strange it was to seem him put it on.
"It fell off from sucking it too much." We believed him until we grew up and discovered his thumb was really shot off in the war.
Familiar as his three piece suit, tilted hat, and London Fog jackets; he was never without his Timex.
It was hard to let him go that day. I stared at him, afraid to blink. People walked around me but I didn't care. I knew when I walked away, he would be gone forever. His hands were crossed just above his waist. The way he held them when he walked to the alter to accept communinion. He was wearing his Timex. Apologizing,I took it from his wrist. The same watch I hated to see him wear was all I had left of him.
I kissed the face of the watch, put it back in the box, and placed it on the shelf just below the island in my kitchen.
posted by Mainer at 10:25 AM
2 Comments:
Whew, I just dealt with the piece about Bailey--and now this.
Well, Darlene, no one's paying me to have the hairs rising on my neck and tears prickling in my eyes. How am I supposed to do the English teacher thing in that situation?
Let's just say that you have deployed various alienating devices that have worked, as planned, not to ultimately alienate the reader but to pull the reader in and in and in some more.
Do you know the phrase about 'can't teach grannie to suck eggs' ('cause she already wrote the book on egg-sucking)? Tonight anyway, I cannot teach you to suck eggs.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tea1.htm
Thank you.
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