Stop the Clock
By Matt Pritchett
It was a quarter past two when my older brother died; I’ll always remember that…although I’ll never have to. He had been in a pretty serious car accident; there was nothing anyone could have done. So I sat there with him, him and his wife, until a quarter past two came around. There are moments in life when time seems to stop around you and you simply abide in that moment until you realize it’s happened; that was the first time in my life I had one of those moments. As soon as I realized that I was, I reached for the watch on my wrist and stopped it on that moment. That’s why I’ll never need to remember what time it was when he died: that watch will always be there, in that moment. It will remember for me.
The day after my brother’s funeral I tucked the watch safely away in a drawer and bought another, at least, until the next moment hit me. From then on, every time the world would stop in its tracks, I stopped my watch and put it in that drawer as a testament to that moment. I didn’t have to wait too long to buy yet another watch because, less than a year after your uncle died, the twin towers fell. I stood there watching the footage, the rest of me still in disbelief, but my hand reached for my watch. Gracious, this is getting pretty depressing, isn’t it? Of course, there have been plenty of times when the world stopped and I didn’t mind. College graduation was one, just before I threw my cap. I’d like to say that the day I met your mother was one, but I had no idea how important she would be to me, not until I kissed her for the first time, there’s definitely a watch for that. Moments like my brother or the towers, the world screeched to a halt, like God stomped on the brakes, but moments like those, it was like He rolled the window down to look at the scenery. There’s one for our wedding day, one for the day you were born, heck there’s one for the day I found out you were going to be born. Other times there would just be a sunrise that struck me just right or an unexpected act of kindness from a total stranger; if I look at those watches, I remember them all.
If you’ve seen that drawer, you know that it’s full of old watches (nicer ones with metal bands and crystal motions when they were gifts from your mother and ones with leather bands or digital readouts when I would buy them for myself, knowing they were only going to last so long). A few of them tried to go before their time: a watch band would snap or it would stop ticking after only a couple of days with a new battery, but one by one they all saw their duties through to the end, whenever that turned out to be (just goes to show that you can’t force those kind of moments if they don’t want to happen).
All that to explain why it is that I’m giving you this watch. It’s a nice one, I think, the kind your mother would give to me; I think it’ll last you a while…though, I suppose that depends on you. In all honesty, it doesn’t matter to me whether you use this watch the same way that I’ve used mine, to stop it in remembrance of those big moments; the important thing is to recognize those moments and let them shape you. Of course, it’s even more important to have those moments at all: some of them will kick your teeth in, but some will make it so you can’t stop smiling. So let them happen, make them happen, and let them make you the person you’re meant to be, just like that drawer of old watches did for me.
