A child's watch

My first watch; bought for me by my parents.

Looking at it makes me feel old and sad; it is so small, but I feel crushed by it.  I cannot conceive having been that young.  

I remember a tantrum in my mother’s car on the first day of nursery school; a poem, a king and a milk-maid; a plastic school-jug of water in Summer; the blackbirds’ elderberry-purple shit on my seventh-birthday white tent; and then what?  

Once, I had only one watch; it had a picture of Snoopy on it, and his front legs were its hands. It was never right, but that wasn’t the point. Its purpose was an adult inculcation: not to tell the time, but teach it.  To learn to tell the time is to learn you will lose everything.