John's New Wrist Clock

It is a honking big wrist watch! "Big Ben", we call it. I don't think it actually bongs every fifteen minutes, but it ought to. John says men tease him about it, but women like it. I didn't know that John would even recognize that, so now we know more about John than we used to.

The watch does not slip easily under his shirt cuff, for the same reason that a frying pan does not. It is like being across the Thames from Parliament. John's new wrist watch commands attention, if not admiration. "Bong!" Quarter after! He lives close enough to Minnehaha Creek so that pressure waves are created whenever the watch bongs. You can see them crossing Lake Hiawatha before they escape downstream. On the other side of the Mississippi, the pressure waves follow the railroad tracks that run parallel to the river. What began as a quarter-past Bong!, somehow gets converted to electro-magnetic signals picked up by the freight trains that worry their way out of town. On-board computers translate the signals to train whistles, so that down the hill from our house we hear long-long-short-long signals indicating a train is approaching the crossing, except that there is no crossing. It all happens because of John's new watch.

It is like having a Court House clock across the table. John sits there, pretending that nothing is wrong, supporting his left arm with his right hand, and partly in order to dampen the vibration from the clock mechanism. Honesty requires that it be called a clock more than a watch. John says he doesn't put it on the side table at night, when his arm needs rest. He hangs it in the stairwell.

The watch came with its own set of tools, the most prominent of which is a watchmaker's pipe wrench. The handle end of the pipe wrench is forked like a crow bar or claw hammer, for pulling up the stem. John uses the pipe wrench for adjusting the time by turning the stem: clockwise for ahead, counter-clockwise for turning the time back. It is best done, John says, over the edge of a table, or countertop.

Ordinarily, John is no slave to fashion, but his new watch has changed him. For one thing, he tilts a little to port when he walks, now, and he has been stopped by the police twice on suspicion of texting Roman Numerals while driving.

Jeff, at the Coffee Shop, recognized that I used a generic watch photo, and wants you to see the real thing:

That's John's wrist behind the watch. John is the real thing, too.

Comments

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