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Friday Slide Show: The Diamond Watch Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

5 May 2023

Aunt Jimmie, who was really our great aunt, had a long and fascinating life. The last time our family visited her at the flat she and Uncle Louie rented on Lombard St., she was downsizing as she prepared to move to Berkeley.

She gave us her glassware and told Mom she had a little something for her that she hoped she would like. Smiling, she handed her a long velvet box and told her to open it. Inside was a diamond watch.

Our mother was overcome. Jimmie said she thought Mom should have it, but she had a dream in which she asked Louie (who she still talked to, she admitted, even if he had passed on years before) if she could give it to Mom and actually heard him say, "Yes."

"All in my mind," she winked.

He’d given it to her before they got married when she was, well, 50. Which just goes to prove, she would say, you never know what's going to happen.

Diamonds around the face, a diamond studded strap. The only jewelry of value she ever had, Jimmie said. From the love of her life, we thought.

She had once told us about the time she moved with her mother and father from Seattle to Oakland, paying double to have a trunk shipped to them with a Victrola and other nice things only to find out the men they paid were both killed in an auto accident and nobody knew anything about a trunk. She had learned as a child to have little attachment to things.

As we left, she said "See you next time!" Which, at the time, we thought meant she would live forever. And if anyone ever could have, Jimmie could have. Her mind never dimmed.

But even now, years later, we suspect she still expects to see us "next time." In heaven, that would be, where she has surely got a place the equivalent of Lombard Street. And some other jewelry of even greater value.


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