Tick Tock? The Thing I Never Lost

What item have you held onto as a child and what became of it. Did you have a doll or maybe a precious baseball card or maybe something else which you feel is much more precious?

Let me tell you about mine.

I will pose it as a riddle.

What is one but not?
It has many parts, but is one body?
Tick! Tock! The clock is ticking…
I’ll give you a few minutes.
I’m sure you hear the usual music with the ticking…

No, not a clock.

Although time does play a part in this story.

It is one, but not alone.
It moves forward, even when some parts fall behind.
It grows, changes, stretches, and sometimes aches.
It holds history inside itself, even when no one is speaking it out loud.

It is made of many, yet known as one.

The answer is not a thing at all.

It is my family.

My brothers and sisters.
My parents.
My cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents.
The stories, the gatherings, the shared jokes that made sense only to us.
The feeling that I belonged to something that existed before I did and would continue long after I grew up.

That was what I held onto.

Not something I could carry in my hands, but something that carried me.

When I was young, I did not think of it as an attachment. It was just life. It was where I came from. It was the net beneath every fall and the chorus behind every celebration. It was knowing that if I said “remember when,” someone else would already be smiling before I finished the sentence.

So what became of it?

Time happened.

People moved.
Some voices became memories.
New little ones arrived who never met the ones who told the earliest stories.
The shape of gatherings changed.
The circle widened, and in some ways, thinned.

But it did not disappear.

It transformed.

What once surrounded me now lives within me.

I carry the names.
I carry the habits and the humor. I learned the ways of loving that were taught without ever being announced as lessons.
I carry the sense that I am part of something larger than myself, and that what I do with my days becomes part of what comes next.

I used to be held by the story.

Now I help hold it.

And maybe that is why I treasure making things, keeping traditions, telling stories, and honoring what came before. Because when your greatest childhood treasure is people and shared history, you learn that the most precious things are not preserved by storing them away, but by living them forward.

So no, I did not keep a doll or a card or a toy in a box somewhere.

I kept a lineage in my heart.

And it is still ticking, not like a clock, but like a pulse, steady and alive, carrying love from one generation to the next.

One, but not alone.
Many parts, one body.
Still moving forward in time.

And still, very much, mine