Don't Forget to Write

Old Things in New Hands

The next day my father picked me up. He asked if I was alright and I said yes, then we were silent for the rest of the ride back to my parent's house in Jersey. When my mom saw the bandages around my head she gasped and put her hand over her mouth, then walked away to her bedroom and I didn't see her again until dinner was ready. I wasn't hungry so I went back to sleep, and woke up in the middle of the night, somewhere around 4AM. My mother was on the couch in the living room, the tv blaring some infomercials as she snored louder than a backfiring motorcycle. I crept past her and into the garage.

The garage was my dad's space, filled with a ridiculous number of tools that most people have never seen or heard of, but that somehow found a use in my dad's hand. The countertops were filled with empty bottles (typical) and old car parts. I remembered many a time as a youth coming into the garage to found my dad in his cups, barely even to stand up straight, drunk beyond anything, but still able to keep the steady hand necessary to work on his car.

In the center of the garage was a black 1969 Chevelle SS - my dad's passion project. When he first brought it home nearly ten years ago, it didn't run, the body was rusted out, and the interior was torn to shreds. But now, though the body still had a couple of minor dents and rust spots, everything else in the car was in mint condition. It was only a few minor repairs away from running just like it did nearly 50 years ago. I sat in it and pretended to be on a one-lane road with no traffic, late at night, the trees and buildings whizzing past me in one continuous blur as I pushed the car as fast as it could go, flirting with the cusp between control and power, struggling to keep the steering wheel straight as the engine howled and the wheels spun so quick they wanted to leap off of the car. I hadn't driven since moving to New York, when I sold my car to afford the down payment on the apartment. I missed it, that feeling of whipping around a turn at quick speeds, of shifting gears seamlessly, revving the engine and letting it loose down an empty road.

The door to the garage opened, scaring me out of my wits. My dad walked up to the passenger door and sat in the car next to me. "I thought I heard you in here. Checking out the ride?"

"Yeah, it's looking good."

"Soon it'll run, and we can take it for a spin."

"That would be... nice, dad."

"This is for you," he said through his accent, handing me something over the shifter. I turned on the car's interior light and saw it was a watch with a dirty aluminum wrist band. The glass over the brass face was murky and had one long deep crack in it. The face itself was spotted with some green and gray residue and the face looked galvanized. There was an hour and a minute hand. Below the center of the watch was a circle that contained a second's hand which did a full rotation every sixty seconds. In the bottom right quadrant were two white panels, like the ones you might see on a train schedule, for the date. The hands were not running.

"To make it work you, wind it up." He took the watch and wound the dial on its side. "Pull it out, then twist to change time." He gave it back to me. I brought it up to my ear and heard a fast ticking, like a small, excited, heart. "It was my father's. He passed when I am young, but my mother gave me it when I finish Sunday school and get confirmed. I wanted to do same for you, but you dropped out. Never confirmed," he said with a tinge of remorse. "Anyways, you twenty-one, practically a man. I think your grandmother would have want you to have it. Reliable machine. No battery. No electronics, just your fingers."

"Thanks, dad." I was unsure of how to express genuine gratitude. He'd never given me something sentimental before, or even said something sentimental. I was always pretty sure he was vacant of all sentiments. My face was red and there was something in my throat. "It's really cool."

He nodded and we shook hands, a ritual he reserved for only the most special of days. Grabbing his hand was like gripping a boxing glove wrapped in sandpaper. "Well, I better go. Time to for work. Goodnight."

"'Night." I went back in bed, putting the watch up to my ear to hear the fast ticking of the constantly rotating gears, the beating of a tiny heart that measured time in our world. In times like these, when a parent does something genuinely kind and good, you try not to remember all the shitty things they've done. You try not to think about the backhands across the face, the belts to the ass, the door slams, the unkind words about your worthlessness, or how much of a smartass you were, or the constant "why won't you just shut up", all those words yelled at a young version of yourself that didn't yet understand the world, words that tore you down to nothing then stuck around in your mind well into your adult years, and still made you feel like nothing... you never wanted to think about those things, especially in a moment like this one. But they all inevitably come through, and tarnish something even as beautiful and pure as the passing of a family heirloom.