Ninety-seven years ago on this day, August 2, my father was born in the little town of Cave Spring, Ga. Cave Spring is about eight miles as the crow flies from where I now live with Leah. The house where he grew up in Rome would be about the same distance by crow, if it still existed. The house where I grew up would be about a mile closer to us than that house, if it still existed. The house where my father spent the last years of his life is three or four miles further out. A new family is in that house now.

At this point, my father’s life exists only in memory or imagination. The memories seem real, but distant. They’re like postcards from the past. I can remember my father coming to my bed to say goodnight when I was a little boy. He would kneel and lean over me silently for a few moments. It was only many years later that I realized he was praying. I remember standing with him and my brother on the railroad tracks, throwing stones into a little pond. I remember him standing in the driveway when I pulled in from Huntsville, and I remember the scratchy, day-old stubble on his cheek as he hugged me. I remember hiking on the Appalachian Trail with him and my brother. I remember him lying in the hospital bed on the last night of his life, worrying that he wouldn’t be able to help me build the house where Leah and I live.

There are a lot of things I will never know about his life. I can’t ask someone at the Post Office about what happened when he worked there, because he retired 40 years ago. Lots of people have started and finished their postal service careers since he retired. Some of the men who served in his Army reserve unit are still around, but not many at this point; he retired from the reserves even before he retired from the Post Office.

It’s a little jarring when I think that he died over 14 years ago. For a long time after he died I would catch myself thinking that I was going to show him some little thing I had done while working on the house. These days I just feel cheated when I find something he would have been interested in.

I’ve written before about how I feel like both of my parents’ lives are receding into the past, out of my reach, and soon enough out of the memories of any living person. That’s a shame, but it’s the fate shared by billions of us who don’t rate a footnote in the history books.

There’s some small comfort in science fiction. Even reputable physicists don’t reject the possibility of time travel as physically impossible. Leah asks me what in the laws of physics says that time travel is possible. I reply, “Nothing, at least as far as I know.” But that’s the point, at least as I understand it. Nothing in the laws of physics says time travel is possible, but nothing says it isn’t. So if time travel is possible, that means that the past still exists.

I believe that I am cut off entirely from that past, even if it does still exist somewhere. I will never see my father again, but I can at least imagine that somewhere he’s still throwing stones in a pond, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and doing everything else he ever did.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my father liked Southwestern jewelry, and that extended to rings. These are all the Indian rings we could find when we went through his and my mother’s stuff while preparing their house for sale.

The ring on the left has mother of pearl. I’m not sure what the green stones are. The next to the right is turquoise. The next one on the right is a coral hummingbird design similar to the watch band design in the earlier post. The last ring is another turquoise design. I can remember my father wearing all of these.
We also found several other rings. Most, or all of these rings were souvenirs that he brought back from Germany after the end of World War II.

My father never wore any of these war souvenirs.
I have no idea what the two on the left are. The second from the left looks like glass, but I don’t know. The third from the left is a lion head design, which apparently was a fairly popular design not necessarily associated with Nazis or the German army. It looks like it might have had a stone or jewel in the lion’s mouth.
The final ring, a totenkopf or death’s head ring, is definitely German military. The sides are decorated with oak leaves and the inscription “west wall.” In this case, the German and English are identical, referring to the German defense of their western front.
I usually associate the death’s head symbol with the German SS, but it was used earlier than the Nazi era, for other units in the WW II German military, and even in the modern US military (showing extraordinarily poor judgment in my view). Unfortunately, some people are attracted to the mystique of the German military that was promoted by Nazi propaganda. Here is a quote from a Web site selling Nazi and WW II German military memorabilia regarding a West Wall death’s head ring: “Here is a ring that can be worn without serious reproach from fools, yet, it bespeaks the valiant struggle of Germany’s best in the crusade that has come to be known as WWII.” You can never tell what sick and sickening thing you can end up finding if you Google something.
The one ring I can’t show is the ring my father wore the most. In fact, he wore it continuously from November 1943 until the day he died in 2000 – his wedding ring. Someone at Floyd Medical Center stole it after he died there.

(On the night I posted about my father’s watch bands, I would his two old Hamilton watches, including his old WW II Army watch. They have to be wound daily, but they’re still running now, although not keeping particularly accurate time.)

My father liked Southwestern Indian jewelry almost as much as my mother. He bought some rings and belt buckles, but what he wore most of the time was silver and turquoise watchbands. The actual watches attached to those bands were quite ordinary, but he also had some interesting watches. Here are some of his watches.

The watch on the left has a heavy silver band with turquoise stones inset on both sides. Here it is from the side.

To put this watch on you have to force your wrist through the open back. My father’s wrist was big enough that it fit him well once he got it on, but my wrists are so skinny I can’t wear this type of band. It’s too loose.

The second watch from the left is one of the original Bulova Accutron tuning fork watches. This type of watch was probably the most accurate of its time. It was sold for 17 years starting in 1960. It is one of the coolest watches ever made. It keeps time with an actual tuning fork that vibrates at (I believe) either 360 or 480 cycles per second. It doesn’t tick, it hums. If you lay it down just right on a wood table, the table will resonate and you can hear the hum across the room. My parents gave me one in around 1976. I would still wear it today, but unfortunately they have some mechanical weaknesses and neither mine nor my father’s works today.

The band in the middle has a clasp on the back. I don’t know much about this band.

The watch on the second from the right is my father’s World War II Army watch. It’s a Hamilton. I wore this one for a while in the 1970’s, but it didn’t work well then, and probably doesn’t work at all today. A good cleaning might make it work again.

The band on the right is called a hummingbird style. It has coral and mother of pearl in addition to turquoise. It was made by a Zuni artist named Amy Quandelacy. It’s one of the few Southwestern Indian styles that I know and can recognize. I also have a band like this that I wear today.

This is not my father’s watch. It’s my great-grandfather’s Seth Thomas pocketwatch.

This watch has seen a lot of use. The engraving on the outside is worn away nearly to nothing. I tried to move the hands, but there was some resistance, so I stopped for fear of breaking something.

I know virtually nothing about my great-grandfather A.B Carnes except that he was a preacher. I have a very vague memory of my great-grandmother sitting in a rocking chair in my grandmother’s house when I was very young. Great-granddaddy Carnes died quite some time before that.