I still have my father’s old wristwatch, with its glow-in-the dark hands and numerals.

He got it when he graduated from high school and wore it until he wore it out. Even after it stopped working, he held onto it for some reason, placing it in the top drawer of his dresser with a few old coins and miscellaneous souvenirs. When he passed away at the age of eighty-six, it came to me.

I still take it out now and then, turn off the lights, and bask in its soft greenish glow as I think back.

I remember the day dad brought our first car home, a dark gray 1948 Plymouth sedan. He wheeled into the driveway of our tiny rented house and honked the horn. Mom and I stood in the doorway watching as he posed beside his prize with a lopsided grin, so proud the buttons would have popped right off his vest, if he’d been wearing one. His metal watch band glinted in the sunlight and caught the eye of my then two-year-old self.

I have a vivid memory of his hands reaching down to pick me up out of the snow where I had fallen. The watch was there.

During quiet times at home, I would crawl up into dad’s lap and put my ear against the crystal of his timepiece, listening to it tick. It inevitably lulled me into a tranquil sleep.

The watch was there as we moved though a series of increasingly larger rented homes in order to welcome two brothers and a sister into the world.

He was wearing it the day he purchased our sixty-acre farm outside of town, the day my life actually began, at age six.

Through every event that transpired during the next ten years, the watch was always present.

I was sixteen when I noticed that dad’s wrist was suddenly bare. I asked him about it and he explained that the watch no longer worked. I periodically visited it in its bedroom resting place, beheld its eerie radiance, and willed it with all my might to run again. It never did.

I keep dad’s old wristwatch in the top drawer of my dresser with a few old coins and miscellaneous souvenirs. I will tell my son all the old stories. When I die, it will go to him. I hope he will pass it and the family stories on to his son.

The half-life of radium is sixteen hundred years.

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