Time

Originally Written Between 2013-2015                                                 

I can still remember my dad telling my brother, Steve - age 10, me – age 7, and my sister, Joanne – age 4, to sit down and listen to him.  My mother joined us at the kitchen table and we all waited for dad to speak.

Both of my parents started smoking when they were teenagers.   They tried and tried several times to quit and knew how hard it was to kick that habit.  Dependency on nicotine was the one thing they didn’t want us to start. They just didn’t want their children to start smoking and then have to try to stop and also get lung cancer and other diseases.

And, so….. they bribed us.  Yes – bribery.  Dad told us that “if we did not smoke by the time we turned 21, he would buy us the finest gold watch money could buy.”  And we were reminded of this promise every year on our birthdays.

Well, I really took this incentive to heart.  To this day, I have never had a cigarette in my mouth.   Not even an unlit one.  Actually, I hated the smell in our house while growing up and now that I look back, I don’t think I would have tried smoking even if I didn’t have the goal of a gold watch.

Steve did really well on his promise not to smoke.  He made it through high school and the tough teen years.  He joined the Navy after graduation and spent the next four years on a Destroyer – the U.S.S. Blue.  He was stationed in Japan most of the time and because he did start to smoke while cooped up in the Destroyer, he bought his own gold watch while in Japan.

That left Joanne and me.  We both got our watches on our 21^st birthdays.  Gold Omega watches.  I was able to wind my watch every day with just the movement of my wrist.  Almost magic!  But. my watch is so old now that I do have to re-set the time and wind it every morning.  And that’s okay – at least I don’t have to buy batteries for it!

Dad died in 1998 at the age of 88.  He gave up smoking four years prior to his death because he was in the beginning stages of emphysema.  This time, it only took him one day to break a 70+ year habit.

A few days after dad’s funeral, I had a very vivid dream that shook me up quite a bit.  I dreamed that I had lost my precious watch.  I had no idea where it was.  Many people were clearly in my dream such as family, co-workers, and friends.  To this day, I can remember sobbing when I woke up.  For several days, I just couldn’t shake that dream from my mind.

A while later, Norm and I were with a group of friends and I related my dream to them – about how confused I was for having a dream about losing my watch.  One of our friends, Dennis, listened very carefully to my description of my dream and he said, “You know, Mary, I think a good interpretation would be that you have wonderful and loving memories of being with your dad and you were crying because you lost your TIME with him.  That watch symbolized your dad.  And, that’s why whenever I look at my watch, I think of dad and remember the good TIMES!