#3

I didn’t know we had a watch shop in my town until I needed one. I’d walked by it for years, but the gold-script lettering on the recessed door had never caught my attention until a local jeweler told me she couldn’t fix my watch but knew who could. 

“Just three blocks up,” she said.

 “Of course,” I said, too embarrassed to admit that after twenty years in this town, I’d never noticed the place.

When I was a kid, growing up in New York City, you could bring your watch to the Mezzanine floor of Macy's. The Mezzanine was a liminal space for retail-adjacent activities–things like gift-wrapping, item returns, complaints department, and watch repair. The background noise was a mix of rustling paper and impatient voices. Nothing really fun happened on the Mezzanine, and you could hear it. 

When I walked into the watch shop in the town where I now live, the metronomic pulse of the place took a few moments to sink in. At first the bell over the door and the sound of my own voice greeting the watch master rang in my head. But after I handed over the watch for inspection and the echoes faded, it hit me–the insistent, off-beat constancy of hundreds of timepieces ticking. They were everywhere–on the walls, in cases, and on the counter.  

I thought you could get all poetic about this kind of place with all that noise. Or maybe lose your mind with so many reminders of the passage of time. Or be inspired by the very nature of asynchronicity and the futility of standardization. Or perhaps, more likely, you’d learn not to notice the background sounds and just focus on the task at hand. I suppose it was like that too on the Mezzanine at Macy’s. All those people shifting their weight and sighing as they stood in long lines. Huh, funny that. 

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash