Watchmaker Recall
I ONCE WROTE a story for a creative writing class my junior year of high school. My teacher was a Mr. Dobbins, who spent his time before becoming a teacher as a world champion in Ultimate Frisbee. I called the story The Watchmaker, and it was the first short prose I had ever completed in any real sense of the word since I was in fourth grade. The assignment was that each student was to be given a picture drawn by one of the art classes, and to write a story about it; my picture was of the back of a worn electric guitar, black and white, focused in on a patch of paint missing near the neck. It was drawn by a friend of mine named Dustin who had a real talent for creating images with pencils (much like myself).I'd like to think that mine was the most creative of the stories written, considering that most of the students in the class probably didn't want to be there except a young girl named Katherine, or Kat, who seemed to actually enjoy writing. It was about a boy who runs away from home to live with an old watchmaker in town. His mother had died some years earlier, and it left his father in some kind of a raging depression the boy cared not to be around. After spending several years living with the watchmaker and spending his spare time in the small shop, clocks littering the walls and floors, the old man brings him to a room in the back that was, by all rights, eternal nothingness. The guitar appears and the watchmaker uses it to describe the boy and his seemingly endless potential. He explains that steel and wood and string are nothing, and yet in the right hands they can change a generation. Even the world. The story ends with the boy contemplating his own existence, allowing the reader to come to the complex realization that the watchmaker was actually a God-like figure. Or, at least, God as he chose to present himself.
After I had finished writing it, I knew that it was good. And when Mr. Dobbins stapled a personal note to the story and handed it back to me, I knew that he knew it was good. I have it buried in a plastic box someplace where my mother keeps all my things from school, and I still consider it some of the best advice I'd ever gotten about writing...because Mr. Dobbins told me what he didn't like. It may sound odd, but I knew that if he cared to tell me what I was doing wrong and not the other students, it was because he saw a potential that he didn't see elsewhere. I believe that, as a good teacher, he wanted to water the seed.
Part of any good creative writing class is peer review, so eventually most of the students in the class read my work as well. The ones whose opinions I thought mattered liked the story, and Kat even made her mother read it, after which she responded, "How old did you say this boy was?" When Kat told me, I was proud. Even more so, I was happy it wasn't simple delusion on my part. The story was actually good.
We wrote the stories on laptop computers in class, whose memories were wiped at the end of the school day. Of course, I brought along a blue floppy disk that held this one and only story for the sake of continuance one day after the next, and I kept it safe within the confines of my jacket, but I was so pleased with my product that I printed out several copies and gave them to friends in school. I can't quite remember anymore, but I may have given copies to teachers as well. Whatever the case was, I know that Mr. Dobbins kept the original copy in a small folder somewhere within the bottom drawers of a metal file cabinet behind his desk.
Years later, when I wanted to begin creating of a collection of my short stories, I realized this piece of paper in Mr. Dobbins' file cabinet was the only hard copy left traceable -- I discovered that after my friends had read the story once it fell through an omnipresent crack in the floor that lead to the Twilight Zone from which it could never be recovered. I meant for it to be the first story in the collection, but it was gone from me. Even the old blue floppy disk had been tossed away at one careless time or another by either my mother or myself.
When by desire for the story became fully realized, I was in my first year of college. So, I took a trip back to high school to see if this lone copy still existed. When I saw Mr. Dobbins strolling down the hall, I asked him what of The Watchmaker.
"So, do you think you still have it somewhere?" I asked him.
"No," he said without stopping, not hardly even looking at me.
"Oh, well, it was just that I was trying to find it for a project and you seem to have the only copy left." I was trying to make it sound as if it wasn't such a big deal, at the same time hinting that of course it was, otherwise I wouldn't be there bringing it up.
And then, before he walked away -- and still without even looking at me -- he spoke the simplest, most heart-wrenching words a young author could ever hear.
"Rewrite it."
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