Category Archives: Personal

Watches of my father

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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.

watchesofmyfather

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

braceletband

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.

hummingbirdband

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

ggdaddyswatch

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.

Fix it again, Tony

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When I was close to graduating with my journalism degree back in 1973, my parents decided I needed a slightly better car, so my father took me to a used foreign car dealer near downtown Atlanta. The dealership was in a multi-story warehouse. Up on about the third floor, they had two Fiats. One was Petty blue, and the other was yellow. I liked the yellow one, so that’s the one I got.

This is what it looked like.

Fiat124sportcoupe

This is not my car, but it looks exactly like it. It was a 1971 Fiat 124 Sports Coupe. I loved it. Despite the common perception, it was a modern, sophisticated, reliable car. It had four-wheel disk brakes; an aluminum, double-overhead cam engine; and a five-speed transmission. It drove like a sports car and got 30 miles per gallon. I drove it all the time I worked at the newspaper in Augusta and I drove it to California when I moved to Lake Tahoe for a while. Then I drove it back home and kept it until I went to graduate school in 1980. I sold it a few years after that to a fellow graduate student.

It never lived up, or down, to the old joke that Fiat stood for Fix It Again Tony.

When I was in graduate school, Leah, who I had not seen in years, was working in Atlanta. One day she called me because she was having some problems with her car. This is the 27-year-old Leah with her car.

leah and her fiat2

It was a Fiat 124 Spider. It was basically the same car I had but in a sports car body. The picture is a fuzzy print I scanned. I can tell from the bumper that the spider was a newer model than mine, but we can’t figure out exactly what year it was.

Unfortunately, Leah’s Fiat ended up wrecked. And unfortunately, we didn’t see each other again for many more years.

Leah and I would both love to have either one of those cars right now. It’s possible to find one on the used market for a not-too-unreasonable price. One used-car price guide says that coupe prices range from around $5000 to $10,000, and spider prices range from around $5000 to $20,000. Another web site says that very few coupes survive today, mainly because the bodies rust so badly, but that the running gear of many coupes lives on in spiders.

Here’s what made me think of 40-year-old Fiats.

fiatmanuals

I found the original manuals for my old Fiat in a trunk that I hauled around through college and for years after that. For some reason the manuals didn’t make it to the person I sold the car to.

Clearing out my mother’s house has been like an archeological dig of my own memory. I feel sure I’ll have more posts based on the memories I have excavated.

Once I was a runner

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I wasn’t an athlete in high school, and certainly not in college. When I graduated and started working at the newspaper in Augusta, I started running regularly. I didn’t run for conditioning, or to compete, or to associate with other runners. I just liked to run. I liked running up hills, I liked running in miserably hot weather, and I liked running in cold weather. I felt good when I ran and I felt good after I ran.

When I quit the newspaper in 1976 and moved to Lake Tahoe for about 18 months, I started running more seriously. The great thing there was that I could run on dirt trails in the woods. In early summer of 1977 I decided to run the Silver State Marathon, which took place around Labor Day near Carson City, Nevada. That was my first race. I trained all summer, gradually increasing my distance, if not my speed. I was happy to finish in under four hours, although about midway in the race I developed a blister on one heel that was about the size of a silver dollar. How appropriate.

When I started graduate school at Georgia Tech in 1980, I got even more serious about running. I had an eight-mile course that I ran every day after school. I wasn’t interested in racing. I enjoyed the time I spent on my solitary runs. I would see someone jogging along my running course and think that I wasn’t like them; I was not a jogger, I was a runner. I couldn’t imagine not running.

Eventually I decided to run a few races. I don’t remember how many I ran in my racing career, but it was less than 10.

These race numbers were in an old trunk I found while cleaning out my mother’s house.

racenumbers

I don’t know which races the unlabeled numbers came from. The Mountain Goat 8 Mile was run at Berry College. The course wound around a dirt road on Lavender Mountain, not too far from where we live now. I also don’t remember the times I ran in all those races, but I was fairly happy with them.

The last race of my career was a 15 km run, the Chieftains Road Race, held in 1984 at Berry College. The certificate in the upper right of the picture is from that race. The winner of the 15-km race was from Mexico City. He ran and won the 5-k race to warm up for the 15-k. His pace was about 5:50 per mile. My pace in that race was a little over 6:22 a mile, the best I ever did. I was fifth in my age group (30-34), and I actually beat the fastest woman runner by about a second.

Not long after that race my knee started hurting. It got bad enough that I had to stop running shortly after that. I swam for exercise for about a year, and then started running again. Slowly. Very slowly. And then not at all. I miss running. I even dream about running. Now I can hardly run across the street.

But once I was a runner.

Monster in the attic

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My brother and I found this note stashed away among pictures and documents that my mother had saved. It’s from my mother to my father, who was called Vaughan, his and my middle name, by family.

notetovaughan2

It’s a little hard to read, so here’s what my mother wrote:

“Vaughan

We have something in the cabinet over the stove or in the attic or in the vent pipe. It sounds big.”

Then, after the drawing of some kind of sharp-toothed and –clawed animal with a yawning mouth, my father replied:

“You think I’m going in the attic if it sounds like that?”

This note was from some time in the 1970’s I think. It was written on a little pad from the Celanese plant where my mother worked. I remember the incident; it was a mouse that had somehow fallen into the stud cavity in the kitchen wall and was unable to get out. We first heard it, then smelled it after it died. I fished it out after it became mummified.

I also remember adding the “something” in the drawing.

I don’t know exactly why my mother saved the little note along with so many other more understandable things, but I’m glad she did.

Sisyphus had it easy in my opinion

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I haven’t been working on my tree-cutting/path-building project for the last few days because a completely unrelated project jumped to the front of the priority list. The real estate agent has found a buyer for the house my brother and I have had on the market since my mother died last year. We had done some cleanup but had left a lot of stuff in the house for two main reasons. The first is that we wanted it to look lived in. The second is that we are procrastinators. The buyers want to move in on April 15, so now we can’t procrastinate any longer.

We actually got a reprieve. The buyers originally wanted to move in on April 1.

My brother and I have been making trips to the house every so often. It’s easier for me than for him because he lives more than an hour away in Chattanooga.

My father, who died back in 2000, was a collector of stuff. It’s really hard to categorize a lot of it any more narrowly than that. He had a lot of tools, including some that look like they were designed sometime around the turn of the last century. He also liked to get power tools. Among the tools he bought was a stand-mounted drill press. It’s about as tall as I am. Its height is appropriate, because it weighs about what I weigh, too.

Now the Parises seem to have a thing for living on hills. My wife and I live on a hill, my brother lives on a hill, and so did my parents. Unfortunately, my father’s workshop is halfway down the hill from the front of their lot.

My father’s drill press is not only heavy, but also awkward to handle. It’s extremely top heavy, with a big electric motor mounted to the top. I had a hand truck, but when I tried to strap the drill press to it, it was so top heavy I couldn’t keep it upright. I had to take the cast iron base off and carry it upside down on the hand truck.

The next problem was that the ground is covered with a layer of dead leaves and pine straw, which makes for poor footing. There are also a couple of sets of steps my father built from concrete blocks. Did I mention that this thing is heavy? Well, it is, even with the cast iron base removed. I was not at all sure I was going to be able to make up to the front of the yard.

Suffice it to say, I got the thing all the way up into the carport, and here it is, still upside down.

The drill press in the carport, with stuff

The drill press in the carport, with stuff

My brother and his wife came down Saturday and we worked for a while going through other stuff. The hospital bill from my brother’s birth in 1947 (it was under $75, with a room rate of $7 a day). My mother’s high school diploma. Letters from my father to my mother before they were married. A nice note from my mother’s high school glee club instructor. The admission pass for a Civil Service exam my father took right out of high school. A box full of cameras. A set of notebooks with my mother’s budgets from right after the war. All the things people save for their children to go through after they die. Maybe I’ll write about a few of them later.