because the little scrap of paper was covered in my fathers small railroad hand, and it told me why the pocket watch had never ticked in all the years I knew him.
The repairman had gone still and slid the watch across the counter because he had popped the back to clean the works and found, folded behind the movement, tinier than a stamp, a piece of paper with my name on it. I unfolded it there at his counter with my grandson holding my sleeve.
My father ran forty years on the railroad. He lived by the clock the way other men live by breath. Every train, every shift, every minute accounted for, a watch always in his vest. So it never made sense to me that his own watch, the one he prized, sat dead in his pocket the whole of my life. I figured it was just broke and he was too cheap to fix it.
It was not broke. He stopped it on purpose, and the note told me when, and why.
Son, this watch is stopped at 6:14 in the morning. That is the minute you were born. I ran on railroad time my whole life, every hour that mattered set by a schedule. Then you came at 6:14 and I understood no hour would ever matter more, so I stopped the watch there and kept it. Open it when you miss me most, and wind it, and it will run again from the minute the best of my life began.
Six fourteen in the morning. A railroad man who worshipped the clock had frozen his own watch at the one minute the clock ever gave him that was worth more than a train, and he had carried that stopped minute in his vest for forty years, next to his heart, and never told me, because he was saving it for the day I would need it.
And I had thanked him for it like it was a pair of socks. I remember the flicker of hurt on his face that last Christmas, when I turned over a dead watch in my hand and clearly wished it was talk of the land or the will. He had just handed me the most tender thing a father ever gave a son, and I could not see past the scratches.
I wound it right there on the repairmans counter. It started, soft, a little tick I had never once heard in my life, running forward from 6:14, from the minute I was born, in my dead fathers hand.
My grandson wanted to hear it tick. He is hearing it now. It sits on the mantel and it runs, and when it winds down I wind it back up, and every time it starts again from the minute my father decided was the best of his life. I miss him most all the time now. So I keep it running. It is the closest thing I have to his voice, and it turns out he set it going the day I was born and just waited seventy years for me to listen.