Dreams of Distant Lives (1989)

Lee K. Abbott's collection of stories about love, marriage, divorce and regret was published by Putnam in 1989; most of them first appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic, The Georgia Review and other magazines. In "Here in Time and Not" a father watches his teenage son Buddy fall in love and remembers his own first love, a girl named Leonna Allen, in the weeks after Kennedy was killed. (Open Library)

Watches

Longines watch: Buddy has his symbols, his father says: last year he gave Stacy record albums by U2, Tears for Fears and the Hoodoo Gurus, and on her birthday in September a Longines he mowed lawns and caddied to pay for. It tells only the time, with no date and no hour in Moscow, but it stands for why he wears Jade East cologne, keeps his room picked up and lets only his mother trim his hair. The day after he bought it, his father tries to talk to him about love while they fix a garage window and is told to leave him alone. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: On her birthday in September, he gave her a Longines watch, whose purchase he'd mowed lawns and caddied for. It told only time, no special features like dates or what hour it is in Moscow, but it stood for something (Lee K. Abbott, Dreams of Distant Lives, scan cataloged as Putnam, 1989, p. 45, in "Here in Time and Not", which runs from p. 39 by the contents page, with the dashes around the aside rendered as commas here; the watch is delivered on the same page and Buddy calls the narrator Dad; Internet Archive scan OCR)