So recently I’ve been throwing things out. This is difficult for me since I know I am on the hoarder spectrum. I will find clothes that I haven’t worn in years but still don’t want to get rid of. In any case I opened one of my dresser drawers and found an old watch in several pieces in the back behind old rubber bands and business cards. I showed it to my wife and she asked about it. I told her that my mother gave me that watch on my 21st birthday. This was about three months after my father had died and both she and my father wanted to give me something special for that important birthday.
It is an old Hamilton watch and I hadn’t worn it in over 40+ years—maybe even longer than that. It was a dress watch and back in those days I was pretty casual. When I told my wife the story, she said we should get it fixed because of the family history. I agreed and sent it off to a jeweler.
The strange thing is that it did trigger memories. I was given that watch exactly fifty years ago. I still find that number difficult to accept. Last fall I drove thru a university I had attended and realized that I had started there fifty years ago. Fifty is not that large a number but fifty years is a very long time.
I know this blog has a recurrent theme of aging, but maybe it’s not so much aging as time passing and memories surfacing. How many ticks does it take for a watch to measure fifty years?
Yesterday in church the priest began talking about his parents and how they helped him experience God. He asked what our memories of that were. I began thinking of my childhood and the almost magical view of God I had. I don’t think this was totally due to my parents. I think the nuns and priests I was exposed to then had a very large part in this. I remember when I was in 5th or 6th grade I would have to wear three or four medals and two scapulars to bed. I would literally clank every time I rolled over. This was because I had been told that if you wore these things you were guaranteed entrance to heaven. So if I died overnight I had a lock on the pearly gates. My parents never tried to dissuade me from this type of thinking. My grandmother from Ireland lived with us. She prayed two rosaries a day for her dead husband and had many more prayers throughout the day. Our house was filled with holy cards given as prizes and rewards from the nuns at school. We also had countless holy cards from the many family funerals.
I remember my parents had this large crucifix hanging over their bed. One time I took it down and found it had secret compartments to hold candles and holy water. I was told that this was for emergencies if someone got sick and the priest had to be called. Apparently many families had these special crosses.
I think death was always a presence in our family. My grandmother’s first child died of complications from scarlet fever and pneumonia when he was nine or ten. My mother’s sister had a child who died of testicular cancer at eight or nine. My parents lived thru the trauma of WWII. My mother was sure my father was going to be killed. She couldn’t sleep and lost a great amount of weight during that time. She also spent much time praying.
I think there was always an expectation that something terrible could happen and we had to defend ourselves as best we could. Polio was a real fear for the parents of that time. I think the vaccine began to come out in the mid 1950s and everyone hoped it would work. One of my cousins told me that there was one day she came home from school and it was like a plague had struck the neighborhood. There were police cars everywhere preventing people from leaving because a few children had been diagnosed with the disease. Given the time, culture and our family history, it’s no wonder that I had such a magical view of spirituality.
So now we are in the second decade of the 21st century. We are constantly exposed to new marvels of science and technology. However there is still a sense of uncertainty about the future. Instead of Polio, we have terrorists and lone wolf gunmen, and new strange viruses. Every day there is something new. Politicians are trying to get votes by focusing on this fear. The media pushes it because it sells “If it bleeds. It leads—etc.” There is an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and insomnia. It is difficult not to get sucked into all of this. I think I have grown beyond my medals and my scapulars, but I still gather comfort from small prayers. I think I always will.