LOSING MY WATCH

I took a shower this morning. No particular reason, I just wanted the feel of water falling all over me. And it was lovely. Drying off, I looked at the sink where I’d left my watch. It wasn’t there. I don’t want to admit that I panicked, but I did feel my heart sink.

This house absorbs things I never see again. It also contributes things I’ve never seen before. I found a red glass salamander sitting on one of my skipping stones. It showed up last night, with its red tongue sticking out. Sure, I like it, but I’d prefer to have my watch back. I’ve looked everywhere.

Because when I don’t know what I’m doing and I’ve been doing it all day, when I’m adrift, and badly need to put my feet on solid ground, I look at my watch. Time serves as a location when all else fails, and location restores me to myself. Say it’s 2:55 in the afternoon. I know The Cub closes at three, but I can hop in my car, be there is two minutes, grab a couple of Mexican cokes and be drinking one at home in no time flat. It would have been so simple, I could have been clear. But no watch today. I keep glancing at my wrist and it keeps being empty.

And every hour has its own built-in mood attached. It’s must be true for all of us. I happen to love eleven in the morning and eleven at night. Maybe because it’s a funny looking word, eleven, and it’s an odd hour, and an odd number, indivisible by two, almost, but not quite the next big thing, midday, midnight. To me eleven always feels like a good place to begin.

A friend of mine had an hour she renamed Rick. It’s quarter to Rick. It’s Rick fifteen. It’s almost Rick-thirty.

The earliest ancestor of the word “time” is a word that mean “to divide.” Maybe we humans like to impose order on what we can’t grab in our bare hands. Thirty days hath September etc. It occurs to me now the same can be said of the urge to write a poem, although imposing order is the exact opposite of a poem. Or is it? I don’t know. We make things out of thin air. Kind of like conjuring, but different. Hard work, but the best kind.

I just this minute ordered a new Timex with a red band. Timex makes the best watches. It will arrive tomorrow. Meanwhile, I am still glancing at my empty wrist. Old habits die hard.

Okay, it’s tomorrow today. I am wearing my new watch. There’s a tiny picture of Woodstock on the face, he’s in the basket of a red balloon flying around. Woodstock from Peanuts. It amuses me that I live in Woodstock although I will never really belong here. Twenty-four years doesn’t count in a little village with so much rich storied history. I moved here from New York City, and am happy here. In that city, you can become a New Yorker in fifteen minutes. You fall in love with it and there you are. In that city, history changes every twenty minutes. In half an hour you’re already a piece of it. Part of that city is still mine, although that part has long since disappeared, but when I think of it, or write about it, I am there again. Because when you lose your heart to somewhere, or someone, time snaps right back.

Anyway, I’ve come to a dead end. I can’t make anything more of this obsession to check the time. I wrote too many pages about it and wound up nowhere. If I think forty minutes have gone by, I check my watch and it’s been five. If I think five minutes have passed, I look at my watch and it’s been forty. It still matters, but I don’t know why. Well, it does help with clarity. There’s that.

So I leave it here. It is three-thirty-three in the afternoon of June 12, 2026. The sun is shining and the sky is blue. My dog is asleep next to me, her upper body draped over the arm of this roomy raggedy chair. This chair is my office, my coffee bar, and if my hands get sticky, it is sometimes my napkin. I look out the window where everything is green. Now and then my dog sighs in her sleep. There have been other times like this, and there will be more times like this, but it will never be this time again.