random brain droppings

I lost my pocket watch yesterday.

We attended the “No Kings” protest in nearby Westerville, Ohio.   After reading all the dire warnings prior to the event, I left my entire “EDC” kit at home:

No pocket knife, no iPhone, no Apple Watch, no AirTag on my keyring, no pistol. And, it turned out, no Hate and Rage.

The protest in our Central Ohio town, like all the others around the dis-United States, turned out to be a peaceful, joyous, and sometimes hilarious event.  Note to purveyors of inflatable frog, unicorn, dinosaur, et.al. costumes: You owe your current financial windfall to Leftist Radicals!

Unlike my much younger sixties protesting self, my rapidly aging body can no longer tolerate heat, crowds – well, honest, I was never good at crowds – or long standing.  At some point nearer the end than the beginning, I found a chair.

Those who know me well know I have a fascination with time.  I’ve read Hawking and (some Einstein) and Gould, Galison, Carroll and others on both the nature and measurement of time.  I could leave the iPhone and Apple Watch at home, but I could not leave home without a watch.

I slid my long-time old friend, my Zeno pocket alarm watch into my pocket.  

Of course, it fell out. While I was collapsed in that broken plastic chair against a well-shaded brick wall.

Fortunately, as the protest ended, my OCD obsession with time obliged me to check the time one more time while walking back to the car, discovered the missing watch, retraced my steps, found the watch, and convinced the equally old lady now sitting in the offending chair that it really was MY watch.  

She knew no ASL so me signing, “it’s really my watch; I’m not stealing it; True Business, not lying” was totally lost on her.  She didn’t call for police or vigilantes, so I assume she either understood or was unwilling the extend effort to protect an artifact of a bygone age.

This watch IS an artifact of a bygone age.  It’s a mechanical – for the young and inexperienced, that means it has a spring and no battery – wind-up, vibrating alarm watch.  

Before the iPhone entirely changed the World for Deaf and Hearing alike, I wore this watch on a cord or chain around my neck, tucked down in my bra, so I could feel the alarm.  It usually failed to wake me when tucked under my pillow, but it managed nicely for not missing trains, or busses or airplanes or “really important meetings.”

The watch has traveled more than than I.  It’s been to Switzerland twice for failed repairs; then to Hawaii once for an excellent & perfect repair.  (Watch & Clock Service & Repair in Hawaii Kai; one of the few remaining true Watchmakers in America.)

It’s not my first.

My original mechanical vibrating alarm watch was a wristwatch I bought sometime in the late sixties during the years I was doing something actually important with my life: Theater!

I had to pause here because the story of that watch, or rather the loss of that watch, is a story largely untold.  I didn’t tell the responding police officers the entire story, everything that happened after three young men with switchblades walked me up five flights of stairs to my sub-let on the -at that time – crime, drug, and poverty stricken, Lower East Side.

When they left, the took with them everything of value, including the last starry eyed faith I had in the basic goodness of human beings. 

Don’t be misled.  I have been – repeatedly – misled down the path of trust in the more than fifty years that have followed since the loss of my wristwatch, including the event that ended my career as an upward bound technical theater expert.

The individual responsible for that specific betrayal died in the nineties.  His name reappeared last week in the news of the passing of a well-loved, well-known, and properly famous actress.  He had touched her life as well.  To her, a hero; to me, evil incarnate.

Like Trump, he was a rich older white man with thinning hair. He aided some, destroyed others, betrayed trust to serve his own needs.

The difference has been, after that day those men took my mechanical vibrating alarm wristwatch, I haven’t been particularly surprised when Human Beings continually prove how flawed and selfish they can be.

Yet, I digress.

Object Permanence.

It’s a basic and essential step in early childhood development.   A child needs to understand that an object, a ball, a favorite toy, a parent playing hide and seek, still exists, even after it has disappeared under a couch or behind a blanket.

I wasn’t able to recover or replace my mechanical vibrating alarm wristwatch, or my career in stage management. I left New York in 1971, ran out of gas and money some months later in California, and began a new life as a Drunk.  

The job didn’t matter – restaurants, mobile homes, life insurance – as long as it paid for my bar tab at the end of the week.

Somewhere in the nineties, more than ten years clean and sober, my life stumbled into a little meaning, value, usefulness, once again when I began working in Deaf services.  The job wasn’t about paying my bar bill; I was actually doing some small things that resulted in some small improvements in other people’s lives.

Imagine that!

I wasn’t thinking about the significance at the time, but, during that time, I finally bought a new watch: this Zeno mechanical vibrating alarm pocket watch. 

I suppose, that’s why it’s important to me, valued enough to retrace tired steps in a crowd, in the midday heat, to retrieve it.  

I suppose, to me, it may represent the possibility of some permanence in the object of human decency.

Even if lost, for 5 minutes in Westerville, or for a quarter century between New York and San Diego, a mechanical, vibrating, wind-up, alarm watch, – or a bit of faith in human decency – can reappear when the blanket of Hate and Rage is removed from one’s eyes. 

My eyes.

I do hope the “No Kings” protests begin to remove the self-serving, golden-threaded blanket currently covering the eyes of many of our quote-unquote Leaders. 

I hope they begin to see the Object Permanence of Human Decency and the Value of Serving Others.

Perhaps.

Perhaps Not.

However, given the excellent service my watch received in Hawaii Kai, and the small ray of Hope I saw shining in Westerville yesterday, I suspect my mechanical, wind-up, vibrating, pocket alarm watch will still be functioning and useful when the current Evil Incarnate in Washington D.C. has expired it’s time, wound down one last time, and disappeared behind the Arrow of Time.