Once Upon a Timepiece by Starr Wood

I have a weakness for timepieces - I treasure the two gold pocket watches that belonged to my grandfather and a smaller gold watch that belonged to my grandmother. My mother must have had ten or more wristwatches in her jewelry box when she died and I still have them although I don't think any of them still tick. I have a clock in every room of my house. When I visit a historic home I am always on the lookout for an antique mantel clock or grandfather's clock to admire.

So the debut collection of twelve short stories by Starr Wood, Once Upon a Timepiece, intrigued me. Each story finds the timepiece - "a 1946 Breitling Chronomat made from rose-colored gold" - in the possession of someone new. The reader is carried along as each month the watch passes from wrist to drawer and from pocket to pawnshop over the span of a year. The telling of how that person - each a stranger to the others - came to have the timepiece is what makes this book such fun to read.

"Well, I didn't see that coming!" is what I found myself thinking often in the reading of these stories. Each one has a twist at the end and it was amusing to see how Mr. Wood gets his main character - the timepiece - into the life of someone new.

Mr. Wood is a journalist and his prose is crisp and uncluttered. His characters are drawn with just enough telling details - the woman with the gorgeous red hair, the obsessively tidy accountant, the self-righteous newspaper editor - as to make them quite distinguishable from each other. 

I am glad I was able to devote some 'time' in my reading schedule to these tales. There really is a 1946 Breitling Chronomat, a watch designed during World War II for aviators. Perhaps Mr. Wood's traveling timepiece looked something like the one below. If so, I would be happy to add it to my collection, but I certainly wouldn't like to let it go!