My Watch

I ran over my watch today. When I say this to people they seem very concerned and confused until I tell them that I wasn't wearing it at the time. It still works, and I now have that special fondness that people get for things of theirs that have been through some kind of trauma.

I had a car for several years, a 1974 Dodge Dart, that was like that. The Dart was a venerable Dodge model and had a kind of engine called a "slant 6," which had a reputation for lasting for a very long time. Unfortunately, 1974 was the first year that they started putting pollution controls on cars and they didn't work very well, so if you tried to accelerate too quickly it would just stall. This made left turns more exciting than you really want them to be, and going up hills was always a challenge, but I got used to it after a while.

The Dart drove across the country and back twice with me in the mid 1970's. The second time, it was involved in a head-on collision right near Mt. Ranier in Washington. It was neither the Dart's fault nor mine, and nobody was really hurt. The Dart's left front fender was bent so as to wrap around the wheel, so the local mechanic pulled it back a bit and said to take it to a dealer. We did, after driving from Washington to Santa Cruz, California. The steering column was bent, so if you turned the steering wheel all the way to the left it would just stay there and you could ride around in circles. The dealer said it would take longer to fix than we had time for, so we drive it all the way back to New York, a semi-wreck. Lots of interested glances on the interstates later, we made it unscathed, and I fondly kept the car for another year before passing it along to my brother, with whom it went to Colorado until he totaled it and left it to die under a 12-foot snow drift in 1987. But even then it lived on, because that winter we got a call from the Brooklyn police to saying the car had been used in a bank robbery. We said, no, the car is under 12 feet of snow in Vail. When the snow melted we saw the license plates were gone, and soon so was the Dart.