Generally speaking, I am not attached to things.

I dropped the watch on a tile floor. I landed face down and made a terrible, flat cracking sound. I knew it was broken before I picked it up.

I took it to a watch repair shop where it had been repaired once before. After a long moment, the proprietor explained he could fix it but that it would probably not keep time properly. He shook it gently and I could hear bits of glass rattling inside. Little bits of glass had gotten down into the works of the watch.

Generally speaking, I am not attached to things. I started to just throw it away but, instead, I wrapped it carefully in a plastic bag and took it with me.

Generally speaking, I am not attached to things.

This particular thing I bought from the duty free cart on an airplane as I was flying to Australia and then on to China. I liked the inner ring that allowed me to quickly calculate what time is was in various time zones. It became the watch I wore on shoots because he had a silent, mechanical stop watch. It’s the watch I wore on vacations. The watch I wore on weekends.

It’s not the watch I will miss. It’s a thing and, generally speaking, I am not attached to things.

What I will miss are the memories connected to the watch. The trips, the shoots, the people. The smooth, silent click of the stopwatch. The rings that named all the time zones. That’s why I just placed it gently in a drawer along with some other things.

Generally speaking, I am not attached to things. But some things take on the freight of memories to be cherished. That’s why I will miss this watch and that’s why I cannot throw it away.