Tina Wright read this memory-piece on Saturday, April 27, 2019, as part of the Tompkins County Public Library Readathon fundraising event.
Some blue jeans have a little pocket on the top of the right front pocket and when I told someone in the family, younger generation, that it was a watch pocket for a pocket watch they said, I wondered what those were for (…good for loose change too.) I got thinking about pocket watches when a kid at work the other night talking about batteries in his wristwatch laughed when I told him I used to have wind-up watches and he gave me that you are a dinosaur look.
My first pocket watch said Little Ben on its face beneath a cracked plastic cover (smashed when picking stones). The Big Ben version was the alarm clock in my parent’s bedroom—with the big butterfly wind-up key—and when my sister and I heard it ringing in the morning from our bedroom down the hall, we pretended we were sleeping and waited for dad to pound on our door and say wake up, time to milk the cows.
I loved my Little Ben in its watch pocket, the brass back reflected the sun and felt cool and sweet in my hand. I set its time by the daily fire whistle five minutes to one that blew in the village of Moravia. Sometimes when we heard the siren in our hayfields miles away, we knew we were late for lunch.
One day we heard the daily whistle around the usual time and it kept blowing for many minutes letting the volunteer firefighters know that a fire had rudely started at a very inconvenient time, just when the daily whistle sounded. So it blew and blew to say hey Moravia this is a real fire!
