Opening the dusty jewelry box, I pulled out the gold timepiece given to me on that long-ago Saturday in 1974, the day I graduated from Columbus High. The watch isn’t as brilliant as it was that day. It’s face-covering has clouded over – or it it my eyes? The hands stopped ticking at some point and I took it to the jewelers to fix and they defaced the clockwork in a sloppy repair job. Zales, I’m pretty sure. The time is stuck on a couple of minutes past two o’clock now.

I can’t remember the last time I wore it.

The first time I wore it was later that afternoon as I walked through the Civic Center to collect my unremarkable high school diploma, one of over 400 to do so that same day.

Nowadays I teach kids who can’t even read a watch or a wall clock. They can’t tell time. It has to be read to them, usually by their phones. It’s pathetic really. If I asked them what a timepiece is I doubt they could tell me.

The timepiece my mother gave me that day hasn’t really kept track of the time that has passed between that May afternoon in 1974 and December 26th, 2012, the day Mama died. I don’t know if I would have done anything differently had I known the day Mama would leave this earth. I always tried to be a daughter she’d be proud of. Ours was never an easy relationship but I think I did attain making her proud. I think each of us three kids managed to do that, albeit it was easier for some than others.

The day she gave me that watch she told me how much my father loved having a daughter, how he would parade me around Fort Benning (now Fort Moore), carrying me on his shoulders or in his arms. Our father loved his children wholeheartedly. The day he was hit with shrapnel in Vietnam, he pleaded with the doctor to save his life because “I’ve got kids,” he said. I didn’t learn that latter part from Mama but from the men who had been with him that day. My favorite photo of Daddy is the one with him kneeling in front of a whole mess of local children at the base of Dragon Mountain. He may have loved us best, but he was one of the oldest of eight siblings, so caring for younger kids came naturally for him. Daddy loved children, his and everybody else’s. It was always hard not to have a father around but it was equally as difficult to never see him get to be a grandfather. So much life missed out on.

The other thing Mama told me the day she gave me that watch was that she would be packing up and leaving Georgia soon. Without me. She needed to get out of Columbus, she said. Too many memories for her there. She wanted a fresh slate, wanted to go someplace where nobody knew her name.

The truth was Mama was a Southern woman and her only son was living in Oregon. She needed to be near him, even if it meant leaving me behind, which it would. Leaving me behind to chase after my brother would become a trend for Mama. She did it again the week I gave birth to twins because what girl doesn’t need a mother around after giving birth to two babies at once?

I like to think that Mama felt I could survive on my own. For the most part, Mama could always count on me to make good decisions. Plus, I have always had the support of good people around me, people who stepped in to be a support to me in untold countless ways. Perhaps I just didn’t need her as much as she felt others did. Most of us want to feel needed,whether we really are or not.

I think about taking the watch somewhere to get it fixed. Someplace that could get it running again. Someplace that could make it gleam the way it did that brilliant day in 1974. It was the first piece of jewelry I ever owned that had bona fide diamonds in it. The only diamond jewelry Mama ever gave me.

But I don’t really need a watch to know how precious time is, or how little of it is left. I see Palestinians picking their dead or dying children from the rubble. I see how they clutch those babies to their chests and weep over them, the way I wept over my dead mama’s body on that long ago December day. And I rail against the American contractors who continue to supply Israel with the bombs that have killed over 10,000 children.

All in the name of a God they and Netanyahu claim to worship.

They say time is a gift but without the peace that ensures safety of all our children, what good is time? For the grieving, time is marked not by watches or even phones but by all the life missed, all the birthdays and Christmases and daily moments spent in absence of those we love.