WE HAVE NO ESCAPE FROM SOME ESCAPEMENTS

At certain intervals during my growing up, the space of such intervals akin to once in a blue moon, Grandpa would take his sharp pointed pocket knife, pry open the back of this big, heavy, silver-colored (maybe it was silver) pocket watch and show my sisters and me the fantastic inner workings of the timepiece.

Sometimes our viewing would be when the watch had run down and everything inside it was still. Other times it would be when it was running, marking off the seconds, minutes and hours. I liked best seeing it when all the little wheels were working, every one of them a different size, all turning at a different speed.

Grandpa wouldn't let us touch anything inside the watch. Even with the point of his knife blade he would never come in contact with these marvelous inner workings. "A hundred of 'em," he'd tell us, his own eyes growing big along with ours. He would point to a little red thing and say things that went something like this, "That's a ruby. This blue thing is a sapphire. And there are a lot more jewels we can't see. They're in behind all these wheels. Twenty-one of 'em." He seemed more proud of the amount of the jewels than all the little moving wheels, some going one way, others in the opposite direction, that fascinated us much more. We didn't know much about jewels then. Still don't.

"And see the things on the edge of the wheels that look like teeth," Grandpa would go on. "They're called cogs. If any one of 'em gets broken, the whole watch is out of kilter. Even this tiniest one here; it's just as important as this big one or any of the others."

When one of us, probably big sister Lillian, pointed to a funny little contraption that rocked back and forth, catching on a cog with the forward rock and another cog with the backward rock, asked what it was, Grandpa said it was called an escapement. He evidently had learned all about the inner workings of the watch when he purchased it, for we never bought anything lightly and never a "pig in a poke."

We certainly know, in a general way, about escapement how to escape from Britts' rampaging bull, the black snake that was coming right toward us, gypsies. Oh, the gypsies! We saw their wagon trains and camps once in a while and thought if they could ever catch us, they'd kidnap us, make us go out and steal for them, wash their wagons, build their fires, etc.

We couldn't imagine what was escaping from that watch and said so.

"The seconds!" Grandpa exclaimed. And then repeated, "The seconds. They are escaping, one by one, every time that little rocking thing goes back and forth. Even when the watch stops the seconds just keep going on by anyway, even though we might want them to stop."

When Grandpa was through with such a session, he'd put the lid back on, wind the watch and return it to his bib overall pocket which was its home. And to prevent it from falling out somewhere in the hayfield, corn rows, or while he was working underneath the binder, digging post holes, etc., it was tied by a leather thing to a brass fastener on his overall strap. Thus to lose the watch he'd have to lose his overalls, which wasn't likely.

It never was lost and now resides on a velvet mounting inside a glass dome and belongs to one of Grandpa's grandchildren. There are many of us who would like to have it and, of course, it will be passed down through the generations so no one of us would have it forever.

However, I carry the watch in my mind and it keeps reminding me, when I feel lower than a toad's belly or someone has "cut me down to size," that a big cog can't turn without a little cog doing its duty. And it reminds me, too, how those seconds just keep escaping, escaping, escaping. Tick, tick, tick, ad infinitum.

Next time something happens to your that makes you feel very small and insignificant, really "put down", think of that tiny cog that can stop a big cog in its tracks and don't let all those seconds escape without noticin' what's happ'nin, man.

REJOICE!