Broken, Time

Kelly First came home with five thrift-store watches yesterday. This is one of them:



That watch had just, by the way, survived a hammer thumping that did nothing more than dislodge the numbers on the face. Why were we using a hammer? Well on this particular watch, neither of us could pry the back off, so we had the idea to smash the crystal and then push out the back from the inside.

Kelly had the idea to wrap the watch in paper and then smash it outside on the front walk. (Which, by the way is something I totally would have done as a kid. Only I probably would have used my BB gun to shoot the watch. No, shooting at glass is probably not the best idea in the world, but I have to tell you that we used to shoot out the bottoms of Coke bottles at very close range because each BB would result in a little pyramid of glass. That is, most of the bottom would stay intact, but where the BB hit it, the glass would fracture and leave a small, jewel-like bit of glass behind.)

Anyway, here is the result of the hammer smashing:


It was a smashing success.

Kelly was really only interested in the process, so I got to bring the watch parts home. These are the "usable" parts:



Though the watches had analog faces, the insides were mostly digital. There were still lots of little screws and a few metal gears and the like. But I'll bet taking apart pocket watches would yield a whole different kind of loot.

Some of the bigger pieces of metal in the watches had to be twisted and torn apart to get at the smaller pieces. This left us with these little twisted bits:



These might be my favorite parts, actually. They remind me of that Hemingway quote from A Farewell to Arms:

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that it will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of those you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry."

If you'll excuse the reminder: Time is never on your side.