Inheritance

A rectangular Bulova, my Zadie called a dress watch, I wore it for years, and though it gave the wrong time I treasured the sense of community it offered, the beauty of certain numerals — the seven especially, the way it leaned into its subtle work and never changed, and signified exactly what it was and no more. In dreams I learned that only the watch and the circle of ash trees surrounding me, and the grass prodding my bare feet, and of course my nakedness were necessary, though common. Just surrendering my youth, I still believed everything in dreams meant something I could parse to discover who we were. As I write these words in sepia across a lined page I have no idea why they’ve taken the shape I’ve given them, some cursive, some not, some elegantly articulated, others plain, many of no use at all. They go on working as best they can, like the Parker 51 that spent its coming of age stumbling backwards into Yiddish or the Bulova that finally threw up its twin baroque arms in surrender to the infinite and quit without a word. The Parker still works and is never to blame. On good days it works better than I, and when it leaks it leaks only ink, never a word best left unsaid. As a boy I would steal into Zadie’s bedroom, find the watch in a velvet box, wind it, hold it to each ear — back then both worked — to hear its music, the jeweled wheels and axles that kept time alive. There is still such joy in these tokens from back of beyond: the watch, the Parker pen, the tiny pocket knife he used to separate truth from lies, the ivory cigarette holder — a gift, he claimed, from FDR who mistook him for a famous Russian violinist. I could call them “Infinite riches in a little room” or go cosmic and regard them as fragments of a great mystery instead of what they are, amulets against nothing.