Multitudes

Lately I've been looking at my watch longer than it takes to read the time. It's a Rolex 16220 with a white Jubilee dial. Some folks call it a computer dial. Viewed straight on, the pattern almost disappears. I rotate my wrist until the light catches it, and the word "Rolex" repeats across the face.

Every time it happens, I think of my grandfather. Sam Wesson. Papa. And a fall night in a crowded church hall when I found out something about him I hadn't known.

It was the annual Scout Awards banquet for Troop 110 at St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Kansas City. I was a Cub Scout, which was as far as I would take it. I was in it for the uniform and the accessories. The pocket knife. The wolf patch.

The room was packed. Scouts and their parents sat at big round tables. There wasn't a meal, but chocolate cake and refreshments were coming.

Then the doors swung open.

Papa came bumbling through them, pushing a cart loaded with cake and drinks. Black slacks, white shirt, thin black tie. He was already having trouble. I knew him immediately and had no idea what he was doing. He had come as the Dumb Waiter.

He dropped cake. He spilled water. He burned himself with hot coffee and soiled his white shirt with fruit punch. He fell. Every attempt to put things right produced another disaster. At one point he took out a pair of scissors and cut off his own tie.

Written down, it sounds like a series of mishaps. In that room it was a performance. He could let you see an accident coming and still surprise you when it happened. He was horribly capable at being an incompetent waiter.

The hall loved him.

I knew my grandfather as a policeman. Now he was making a fool of himself in front of everyone I knew, and I was proud enough to burst. I wanted everyone in that room to know he was mine.

There had been a clue.

When Papa was a boy, he'd been considered for a part in a film called Sonny Boy. I think Cesar Romero was connected to it. Papa never appeared in the film and I don't know that it was ever made.

What I remember is the newspaper clipping. Young Sam in shorts, suspenders, and a bow tie. All you had to do was ask and he'd bring it out. His requested payment had been a watermelon and a pony. I knew that story before the banquet. Somehow the boy in the photograph and my grandfather had stayed separate people in my mind. One had wanted to be in the movies. The other was Papa.

Then the doors opened, and there he was. Troop 110's own Jerry Lewis.

The banquet wasn't a fluke. Sam was fucking interesting.

He and my grandmother, Betty, lived in a house that was a treasure chest. There was a box of unusual knives, handmade pieces, each with something worth examining, and Papa had a story for every one. Some, he claimed, had come out of the KCPD evidence room long after the cases were closed. That's a considerable thing to tell a kid holding a stiletto switchblade.

I didn't know what an evidence room looked like. I could imagine one. I could imagine where the knife had been before it reached the box. The marks on the blade were almost certainly rust. To us it was blood, maybe Pretty Boy Floyd's.

An object like that could keep me busy for a whole visit. Papa never made a lesson of it. He read because he wanted to know things. He collected because something caught his eye. He told stories because he liked telling them. Being around him, I started to suspect most things deserved a closer look.

I have a fencing foil of his on display in my garage. I have his cane, too. The cane conceals a sword in a sheath.

Of course it does.

I pass those pieces often. Sometimes I stop.

Betty was his favorite person in the world. For all the things Papa found interesting, that was never in question. They held hands well into their old age. One of my clearest memories is pulling away after a visit. The two of them on the front porch, holding hands, smiling ear to ear, waving goodbye.

They seemed grateful for however much time we'd chosen to give them that day. I was young. A visit ended and I went on to whatever came next.

My youngest daughter is a senior in high school now. Before long it will be just my wife and me. I'm watching her life grow past the places I can take her, and I think about that porch. How pleased they were that we'd come. How easily I assumed there would be another afternoon.

I used to be the one in the car. Now I'm closer to the porch.

I wish I could go back. I'd stay longer.

I've been having trouble writing lately. I can describe a watch, account for its details, explain why a dial interests me. What I've been trying to get at is why I care enough to do any of it.

Then I catch myself turning this watch in the light.

The policeman who could command a church hall by falling down. The collector with a story for every knife, standing quiet on a porch, holding my grandmother's hand. The boy who wanted a watermelon and a pony, still in there somewhere. Whitman wrote “I contain multitudes.” I loved my grandfather, and I kept discovering him.

This Rolex was never Papa's. He didn't wear it. He didn't give it to me. There's no family history attached to it that I can trace, but I've been wearing it, and it keeps bringing him back.

I look down to read the time. I hold there a moment. Then I rotate my wrist and the lettering comes up across the white dial.

The church hall. The round tables. The chocolate cake.

The doors swing open.

Papa comes through with the cart, wearing his thin black tie. For a moment I'm a boy again, and I know the man coming toward us.

I have no idea what he's about to do.

The watch behind Multitudes

Rolex Datejust 16220 with a white Jubilee computer dial. Available at Vaulted Watch.

View the Datejust, photographs, condition and current price