OF TIME AND MEMORY: Gifts given and dreams taken away

When I was 10, maybe 11, my parents gave me a watch for my birthday.

This wasn't like getting a balsa wood model airplane to make or a book about the adventures of Robin Hood.

This was a serious gift, almost like a passage into the adult world. With a brown leather strap.

Within a week however I had fiddled with the winder and pulled it right out accidentally.

The precious watch was broken.

I was embarrassed and scared of what my parents might say, so I hid it in a drawer.

Shortly after my mum found it and when she spoke to me about it I burst into tears. I don't think my dad said a word, just looked at me. And that was worse.

I had let them down, failed at whatever the watch was intended to convey about being grown up, responsible, trustworthy . .

I was a disappointment..

Around the same time I would climb to the top of the hot-water cupboard in the bathroom where the sheets and towels lay folded on shelves because up there was where Christmas presents were kept.

One day I found two sheath knives, one with a brown handle and a cheap compass sewn into the sheath, the other with a handle of bone.

I was a Boy Scout so clearly these were going to be for me.

I loved the thought of the one with the bone handle in its dark leather sheath.

Quite often I would climb up and take another look, hold the sacred object in my hand to feel the weight of it.

When Christmas came I was given the other one and so was disappointed, but also excited by having a knife of my own.

I never knew what happened to the other one.

I hadn't thought of these things for many, many years although they were there, quite clear in my memory.

But yesterday I heard the exceptional new album Personal History by Mary Chapin Carpenter and on it she pays tribute the late Guy Clark in the song Paint + Turpentine.

The song mentions a Randall knife and immediately my mind went back to the first time I heard Clark's song The Randall Knife, a spoken word piece about his father's knife.

Clark tells the story of how precious that knife was to his father, but how he took to a Boy Scout camp and broke the knife when trying to stick it in a tree. He hid it for a while but of course his dad found it “and put it in his bottom drawer without a hard word won”.

When his father died they scattered his ashes at sea, just as we did with my dad.

So much in the simple pathos and symbolism of that song resonated with me when I first heard it.

I was probably 40 at the time, but in that moment was back as that shame-faced boy with tears welling up about a broken watch, seeing again the disappointment on my father's face and remembering the knife I coveted but never got.

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Footnote: I have written a review of Mary Chapin Carpenter's Personal History here.

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These entries are of little consequence to anyone other than me Graham Reid, the author of this site, and maybe my family, researchers and those with too much time on their hands.

Enjoy these random oddities at Personal Elsewhere.