2007-03-29 - 4:04 p.m.
I've realized that of three big breaks that those of us who work in schools get, Christmas, spring, and summer vacation, my favorite is spring break. While I love Christmas, Christmas break is too frought with obligations and expectations to be truly relaxing--all that shopping, spending money, fighting crowds, doing things you think you are supposed to do instead of just things you want to do, those things kind of diminish the pleasure of Christmas break.
Summer vacation has a problem of a different sort for me; I usually put too much pressure on it to be perfect as a kind of "last chance" gasp at having something good until the whole long new school year starts again. Where is the perfect place to go (because, you know, you have to go somewhere, although I often don't), so I am constantly running my mind over things like "cruise", "Mexico", "Hawaii", "Europe", "the Caribbean", "Road Trip", or whatever. It's just too desperate and potentially expensive and likely to be disappointing and insufficient.
Spring break, however, it's just a freebie, as far as I am concerned. No obligations at all, really, no last chance, just pure relaxation or enjoyment. Also, I realize that for my taste, spring has the best weather in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that I love the TROPICS (but the tropics have other things going for them than simply "heat", such as delicious blue ocean water, pure white sandy beaches, etc.), the dry-desert summer heat of Los Angeles isn't really that much of a pleasure to my body, and particulary so since my apartment doesn't have air conditioning. So it is hard to get things done. But in spring, the weather is delicious and inviting, particulary in the evening as various wonderful floral smells (gardenia? honeysuckle? bouganvillia?) flow down from the hills behind me. Spring is the one season in which I really do love Los Angeles, and that is saying a lot, in that normally I consider L.A. to be uninhabitable and generally a crowded, ugly, self-centered, falling-apart mess. But in spring it is worth all the money we waste on housing, gasoline, and other "greater than the rest of the country" outrageous expenses, and all the time we waste on commuting and otherwise attempting to get around (for example, in a book I have that lists of all the world's worst things, the world's WORST freeway interchange, the 405 and the 101, is the one I would have to use every commuting day except that I know better than to use it, and the second and third worst are also 405 interchanges).
But right now, it is spring and everything is lovely.
What I've been doing is getting things done that I have procrastinated on or put on the back burner for far too long. I finally got my brakes fixed to my satisfaction. THAT one I have been working on for months now, so that's not a procrastination. But my normally-very-good mechanic failed utterly with that job, so I finally went to somebody else. Now they feel like "Rolls Royce" quality, or maybe I should say "Cadillac" quality (as the car IS a Cadillac). It's funny how having good stopping power makes the car seem to GO better. Well, I feel much more secure about going when I know that I can stop! And considering the fact that my drive back home from work involves an incredibly steep and convoluted path down from Mulholland Drive, the spine of the mountains that separate the L.A. Basin from the San Fernando Valley, to Ventura Boulevard on the valley floor, maybe you can understand how having brakes that felt terrible negatively affected the enjoyment of my daily drive home.
I have an appointment tomorrow to get my eyes examined and to get a new pair of glasses. I am now squinting ALL THE TIME, so that has got to stop. I sure would like to get rid of that constant blurry vision in all three of my vision levels. I've got progressive lenses that go through three levels of correction from close-up reading to distant seeing, and all of them are bad. This will be a new doctor for me, but reviews I have read of him make him seem really wonderful. My last doctor basically said "I can improve your prescription a little, but your glasses are so expensive it isn't worth it." He managed to discourage me for several years. Well now, expensive or not expensive, it definitely is worth it.
Today was kind of fun and interesting. One of the things I got from my Dad's a couple of weeks ago was a beautiful gold Hamilton pocket watch that my grandmother had given to my grandfather. She had had it engraved with his full name and her initials, and the date in April of 1960. That might have been his birthday, I'm not sure, I'll have to check it out. We kids made a "gentleman's agreement" that when we said we wanted something, we wanted it because we wanted it, not because we thought it was valuable enough to sell. I think we all honored that. And there were some things that we thought were more valuable to sell than our desire to have, if that makes any sense, so those things we ARE selling and then dividing up the money. Since it seemed that we were all honorable and honest about this, there were some items that each thought should simply go to one of us for one particular reason or other, regardless of value, and one of those was for this pocket watch to go to me, mainly because I was named after this grandfather and therefore it is "my name" that is engraved on the back. So, I now have it to have, not to sell. I figured that it would be cool to actually use it sometimes, such as if I am really dressed up. It's truly a beautiful watch, no doubt about it, although I am more of a wrist-watch kind of a guy. Still, I love the coolness of it, and it WAS my grandfather's, so that makes it even better.
However, I discovered that this watch had some confusion between winding it and setting it. Pulling the stem out to set, and then pushing it back in to wind, you couldn't wind it, it would just keep setting. But then a few days later, you COULD wind it, but by then, the setting was off. So I decided to take it to a watch repair man that I know. This particular repair man had a small shop on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and had been then for years (28 years, to be exact). I always went in there to get new batteries or new watchbands for all my admittedly really cheap watches, which the man would do with perfect charm and friendliness, surrounded by his huge stock of beautiful, high-quality antique watches. I had been to other shops where the guys kind of snear at you when you hand them a Casio or whatever, as if it were a defilement for them to work on something that wasn't a Rolex. But not this guy. He seemed to love ALL watches, expensive or cheap, and his main orientation was for you to leave his shop happy. So I always wanted to some day bring him a GOOD watch to repair and now I had my opportunity.
But alas, when I went out to bring my Hamilton to his shop, I couldn't FIND his shop. Several drive-bys in the vicinity of where I remembered the shop had been revealed to me that the entire building had been closed down and painted over. That building will be remodelled, torn down, or converted into million-dollar condominiums--that's what is happening all over Hollywood and I not only hate it, I just don't understand it. It doesn't make economic sense to me, but seems artificial. Removing businesses one-by-one, only to replace them with hugely expensive, impractical, luxurious high-rise condos in a noisy urban environment just doesn't compute with me. Manhattan, maybe, but L.A.? Anyway, somebody must be making a lot of money via this kind of thing, at least for the time being, until this particular bubble bursts (if it does). Meanwhile, where is my watch repair man?
Fortunately, I got smart and looked him up in the yellow pages. He had kept his same number so I was able to get ahold of him. He told me hadn't found a new location, yet, as rents are two and three times what they were in his old shop. "I could make money repairing watches with a rent of $800 a month, but $2,000, no, I can not," he said in his broken Eastern European English. (He is Bulgarian, and that is a nationality you don't run into every day, even in Los Angeles.) However, he would repair my watch in his apartment and invited me over. He seemed very impressed that I had sought him out, and had found him. That I wouldn't let just any old body work on my watch. Well no--when I find somebody good, I stick with them.
His apartment amazed me. It looked really crappy from the outside, a typical, now nearly invisible 1950s-type two-story strip of an apartment building of which hundreds of thousands were built when L.A. had its 1950s population boom. But inside, it was HUGE--with a large living room, separate dining room (complete with crystal chandelier), large kitchen, laundry room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a nice long balcony that ran along the whole width of the apartment. He took me outside and sat me down at his work table on the balcony, which is where he now does a lot of his repair work. (Cleaning, though, he said he did downstairs in a room he has down there, but what that room is, I have no idea. But he does the cleaning down there, because it is dust-free.) During our conversation, he told me that he owns this building, bought it free and clear, which I think had to be a very smart investment. I was impressed and pleased that he had been willing to invite me in and take me into the recesses of his private domain. More like I was a member of his family instead of simply a customer.
The man LOVED my watch. He carefully opened it up to show me the bejewelled inside of it and I, too, could see the amazing beauty of it. Such tiny, tiny gears and springs, etc. He showed me the stamps in the metal that indicated that this was 18 carat gold, something that impressed him a lot. "This is a very fine, very beautiful treasure of a watch," he said. "Made in the U.S.A. They do not make them like this anymore. Your grandmother gave it to your grandfather. He gave it to your father. Your father gave it to you. And now you must give it to your son." I said, "Yes." He showed me what was wrong with it, how the stem shifts from a winding gear to a setting gear, but now it misses. He showed me how the second hand is supposed to keep ticking when it is wound. "If you set the watch clockwise, see how the seconds hand keeps going?" It did. "But if you set the watch counter-clockwise, the seconds hand is supposed to keep on going." He showed me. But the seconds hand stopped. The whole watch stopped. "It's not supposed to do that," he explained. "I will have to replace this pin." He also told me that the watch had never been cleaned ever. (It looked pretty clean to me, but what do I know?) "You know how I know?" he asked me. "Because there are no scratches on the screws. It is almost impossible to open these screws without leaving a tell-tale scratch from the metal of the screwdriver." Wow, it was fascinating to be taken on a little journey inside this magnificent watch. He makes me want to use this watch more than just occasionally. "But you have to use a watch chain," he said. "Don't put it in your pocket without a chain. You can use a gold-plated chain, that's okay, it doesn't have to be 18 caret gold." He also pointed out to me that the little ring surrounding the winding knob (that a chain would attach to) was not the original one--this ring had come from the chain. "This had been replaced," he explained. How he knew that...well, I guess he just knows. After several decades of repairing watches.
I loved being with this elegant, careful, polite, gentlemanly old guy and my experience with him underscores my current love of skilled craftsmen. There is something about them that is rooted in the old, solid values. That they have a trade that they can work with their entire life and continue to get better and better as time goes on. That they love old, quality-made things, And the value of gold is important. Something solid and timeless, not easy-come, easy-go, not disposable. With me, I feel like my whole life is paper--it's pushing paper, written on paper, fiat-money-made-of-paper. For my final 30 years, I want to increase the reality of my personal substance. Somehow. "And now you must give it to your son." Yeah, okay. I promise. Something of me will have to be passed on to somebody else. What, who, how...the golden river of time will have to reveal.
Meanwhile, I am loving the fragance of the flowers that comes flowing down out of the hills. I'm taking time to stop and enjoy that.
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