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The interpretation that yielded insight came in a jewelry store, brought to me by a clerk bearing a tray of expensive watches.
No heirlooms had been handed down across the generations of my family, no embodiments of tradition passed on from the long-distant past. My grandparents were young when they first arrived in the New World: it was they—not the new world—who had been brave. While their spirits were full, their hands were empty. Still, they planted their upended roots. After them, their children, my parents, labored to prove that the family could be hardy. They survived the setbacks and the hardships of the Great Depression.
I then grew in the shelter my parents and grandparents had provided, in a setting in which even the most tender of plants could flourish. Thus I had the good fortune eventually to age in relative ease. At last I came to a time of such comfort that I was able to wonder not only what I could provide to my own children but also what I could leave behind for them. Like most parents, I did the best I could to promote their experiences and values, knowing that I did so clumsily and far from ideally, as seems inevitable for anyone living in the world of reality.
At one point I wished there were something I could leave them as a tangible embodiment of the chain of family history, preferably something valuable they could themselves use and later pass on. Regretful that there was nothing of the sort that I had received from the generations before me, I decided to try to create such a family heirloom. Therefore, when for the first time I finally had sufficient discretionary funds, I decided to buy an expensive Swiss watch, as if for myself but in my mind mainly for my son to inherit from me in what I hoped