rfromme@ns1.crl.comrfromme@stic.net
I remember back in Hoxie, if things got kind of boring at home,
Phil and I could walk down to Mickey's Hardware and sit on the
bench out front with Frank and Ike Daws. We could, watch the cars
and pickups drive up Main street.....all of us in silence, until
one of the old and lanky Daws brothers would ask the other for
the time. Up, over and in would go the long, skinny old arm, in
a patched red woolen longjohn sleeve, and out from the faded
grayness of a front coverall pocket would come the big round
five-dollar watch on its warn gold-plated chain. A smile would
come over each of their lips and then came the words, ''There
she is!'' And then the other's response, ''Damned if she ain't!''
Time, to these two dusty old fellers was female. It was as if its
reading was a ritual. Perhaps time, for them was as an
unattainable lover or something to be place on a pedestal or
worshiped in all its mystery or beauty like 'Cleopatra' or 'Helen
of Troy.'
I think Phil, the younger and smarter of those two little Fromme
boys, was the first to figure out that neither of them could tell
time.
The pocket watch was, then, a source of pride. Frank and Ike
shared the honor of wearing this wonderful round, mysterious, metal
thing from day to day. However, that which it symbolized seems to
have gone with them, quietly to their humble graves.
If time were money, those two stockingless souls, wearing warn,
brown, round-toed, halflaced, untied shoes lived as rich as any.
Perhaps they had too much of it to count....time that is...., and
the pocket watch was, like a lost key to a safety deposit box which
held a treasure. For them, the watch and the telling of it's time
was like a poorly recorded or forgotten combination to a bank vault,
where there had been stored riches, too grand and glorious to face
.....as if the contents, taken out and given reality, might overly
complicate their lives. After all, there was enough complication
already, in trying to decide just where to sit on main steet in
order to stay out of the sun. Then, too, Frank and Ike had their
there share of woe, with all those mice which would run up their
legs as they unloaded dry goods and feed bags for spare cigarette
change from benevolent merchants in the little farming community.
(Hoxie is the small farming community in Western Kansas where I
grew up in the 1950s. Frank and Ike were in their 40s when my little
brother, Phil and I knew them.)
