matt er of time Story by Katharyn Privett-Duren
For all it’s worth, New Year’s Eve meant very little to me until my hair began to fade to white. Oh, I loved the bubbles of champagne and the sparkling reprieve from winter’s bluster, but as an academic: I knew that there was a decided lack of evidence for the theoretical solidness of time. And so, as the midnight hour struck and drove bursts of confetti into the night air of Alabama, I would toast to the whimsy of the tradition and retreat to my bed, post-haste. Somehow, time marched on as I slept, regardless of my faith in it. Certainly, humankind noted these moments to cure the abstraction of it all, marking them in order that they might harbor memory, life, and meaning. Kierkegaard would have approved of my position, I knew, and so I stopped celebrating the first of January altogether. And then, I found my gran’s watch. It had been tossed amongst the pins, cocktail umbrellas, and the bits and pieces of living that held no tangible value after her death. My fingers stretched the elastic band, an act born of tactile memory, as I was transported back to 1960-something: her hand on mine, quieting my squirm against a church pew, the steady tick of her watch counting down the minutes to freedom. She had worn it while making biscuits, shoved far up her forearm to avoid the fluff of flour. Her finger had tapped its circular glass window to measure my contractions, little beats against the hours that would bring forth her first great-grandchild. Embedded just at the winding post was a flit of gray string, marking a hasty retreat from her favorite sweater—perhaps, I hoped, just after hearing the phone ring on her way back from the garden. Was it me on the other end? I wished it so with all of my heart. Her weathered Timex had stopped marking her work, her coffee time, and her soap opera rituals at exactly 6:30. I wondered if she had known that moment, if she had thrown it into a drawer in hopes of repair, if it had slipped into the soapy water of dinner dishes, if she had loved it too much to dispatch it altogether. The blur between the life that it had marked and its journey to my own hand was a rough saccade, and when it finally became still, my memories flushed into the space and filled it with the sweetness of her. A chronostasis of sorts
92 | Winter 2023
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