I have a bunch of junk at my house. Well, maybe junk isn’t the correct word. Maybe it’s more like clutter. Stuff that has accumulated from my life… from my kid’s lives… and from my mom and dad’s lives too.
I have a day of reckoning coming soon with all of this. I’m finding in a lot of cases it’s just stuff. But then again, there is that special item that you come across that you know you will just hold onto forever. That happened for me a couple weeks ago. I was talking with someone I work with about watches. Turns out this guy is a real watch aficionado. As we discussed the various watches I have had over my lifetime and the ones that are in his collection, it caused me to remember my dad’s watch.
As I have mentioned before, my dad worked in retail sales for about 50 years. One of the things that happened as a result of that, a salesman that represented various health and beauty aids gave him a promotional watch. This watch was gimmicky as you would expect since it was really just an ad… for a toothpaste company. The thing that made it unique and fun was the second hand was a little smear of toothpaste that ticked off the seconds as it raced around the watch face. When my dad passed away, the watch was there amongst all the various items that mark a person’s life. I picked it up and it ended up in the back of a drawer at my house.
When I was telling my co-worker about this watch, his eyes lit up! He said, “I would love to see that, and if it isn’t working maybe I can get it running again.” As it turned out, he was able to change the battery in it and it immediately started ticking. When he had secured the battery and replaced the back on it, he turned it over and I could see that toothpaste counting off the seconds as it moved around the face of the watch. I immediately got choked up and started crying.
Who would have ever thought that a cheap promotional watch would have elicited such a response. But I have come to realize, the things that are truly of value when it comes to remembering someone are the small items of their day-to-day life that we hold close in our hearts… my grandfather’s straight razor, the small patchwork lap throw that my grandmother made… Those are the items that will make the cut when this great purge begins… all the rest will go to clutter someone else’s space.
Living Life On The Narrows 