Let Me Be Frank with You (2014)

Richard Ford's fourth Frank Bascombe book, published in 2014, is made of four linked stories narrated by Bascombe, now sixty-eight, a former realtor settled again in the New Jersey suburb of Haddam in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In the first, "I'm Here", he drives out to the shore to see his old house in Sea-Clift, sold to Arnie Urquhart in 2004 and now wrecked by the storm. (Open Library)

Watches

Swatch watch: Driving to meet Arnie Urquhart with Copland's Fanfare on the stereo, Bascombe admits he has not looked up the paperwork from the sale of his own house. It is not true, he says, that things slide away as you get older; he simply does not care about some of them, and though he now wears a cheap Swatch he sometimes loses track of the day of the month near the end and the beginning, which he considers normal. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: I now wear a cheap Swatch watch, but I do sometimes lose the handle on the day of the month, especially near the end and the beginning, when I get off-track about “thirty days hath September . . .” (Richard Ford, Let Me Be Frank with You, scan cataloged as HarperCollins Canada, 2014, p. 16, in "I'm Here", the first of the four stories; Internet Archive scan OCR)