My paternal grandfather, Al, died when I was in the third grade. Born and raised in Miles City, Montana, he’d been through many incarnations in his 76 years. Deputy Sheriff in Custer County, banker in Omaha, steel worker in Seattle, retired in Hayward, California. I remember him mostly as a gruff, barrel-chested man who helped my father remodel our dank, concrete floored basement.
Together, they laid vinyl tile over the concrete, making the design of a checkerboard and a shuffleboard court for indoor gaming. A stone fireplace filled half of one outside wall, just below ground-level windows. On either side of the masonry, my father placed a framework of two-by-fours, over which he nailed knotty pine siding. Grandpa Al’s job was to stuff fiberglass insulation into the cavities behind the siding and between the studs.
He wheezed a lot while he was doing this. A smoker all his life, my dad said he had emphysema, which slowed him down a bit. Slow enough that, a few months later, my father flew out to the Bay area to visit Grandpa in the hospital. Two weeks after that, he made a return visit for the funeral, bringing back with him several mementos for my sister and I. Mine was Grandpa Al’s Hamilton watch, gold-plated, with a rectangular face and Roman numerals. I proudly slipped the metal stretch band around my wrist and wore it to school, now independent of the wall clocks.
A few days later, bored in class while the teacher wrote sentences to copy on the blackboard, I slipped the watch off, and began to fiddle with it. After winding the stem to keep it active, I pulled the case back over my hand, and discovered the crystal was loose. Giving the edges a couple of mild tugs, I popped out the crystal. Looking carefully at it, the glistening reflections coming off the concave inner surface intrigued me. I held it up to my eye, and looked through it at the words written on the blackboard.
I could actually read them! Up to now, I had been listening to her as she read them out for us, memorizing them so I could reproduce them in my cramped, sloppy handwriting on the lined exercise sheet. Being able to see the sentences saved time and I finished way before my classmates, owing mostly to my lack of care in trying to write neatly. In the idle time while the rest of the class struggled with the long-hand, I continued looking through the crystal at objects around the room. The globe came into sharp relief; the alphabet, in capital and small black blocks above the blackboard, were now dark and clear, no longer fuzzy suggestions of letters.
“Albert, what are you doing!” I looked up to find the teacher hovering at my desk. “Let me see that. What is it?”
I tried to explain about my grandfather, his watch, the loose crystal, and the sudden clarity of my vision..“Give it to me. You can pick it up after class.”