Goodbye, Old Paint

My beloved and reliable running watch, face cracked years ago after being accidentally dropped on the brick patio of a Courtyard Inn on the Cape, has finally stopped. The digital numbers, still big enough to read without glasses, vanished into blankness without me noticing this weekend. Perhaps when I chose the Garmin over it for my long run (this watch does not have satellite capabilities) Saturday, and then chose the freedom of watchless running on Sunday, it decided it was a good time to retire. After all, it has been in almost constant use since the summer of 2007, when I decided that I needed a “real” running watch (i.e., one with a digital readout, ability to time workouts, and rubber wristband) instead of the Mickey Mouse one (literally, not metaphorically) I was using. While I still periodically use the Garmin, which calculates my pace, calories burned and miles completed, I always come back to this cheap Nike black and yellow watch. When my fancy Anne Klein fell off my wrist and broke one afternoon in the hallway of Central Falls High School, I started wearing the Nike on a daily basis, no matter how nice my outfit. Not only could I read the time, but I saw it as a voiceless sign to other runners: “Me too.”

 Buddhists say that attachment leads to clinging, to expectations that can’t be met, to a life of disappointment in things not being as they are. Yogi ethical precepts include aparigraha, or non-possessiveness, and liken attachment to carrying extra baggage, both material and emotional. Both suggest that disappointment will arise from being attached to outcomes over which we have no control.

 I am not feeling bereft because the watch was valuable—it was probably $40 at the most at Dick’s Sporting Goods. My sense of loss is partly about its representation of my progress from walker to walk-runner to marathoner to recreational runner. It also helped me figure out much time I had before leaving the house for school, whether I had time left in class for one last activity, and how much longer I had to stay in meetings before I could say, “I really have to go.” Its value is in its non-obtrusiveness and reliability.

I find that I am attached to many objects, not for their value but for sentiment. I love the white wicker basket on the toilet tank that holds my brush, comb and hairbands. My Aunt Chartie gave me a bunch of little gifts in that basket from the department store where she worked right before I got married. I love the cat food bowls my sister-in-law Joyce made when she was first making pottery. We have many finer pieces she has made since, much more skilled and sophisticated, but I still love these bowls best of all.  I love the Pizza Express cups that remind me of Bloomington.  And I love the Rose of Sharon trees our neighbor John gave us from the garden he and his wife Mary Lou tended before he died a couple of years ago.

So now, as one neighboring family divorces and another one moves away; as I mourn the passing of beloved friends and newborns; it is as about as much as I can handle to mourn the passing of a watch. Goodbye, old friend.