The Roleux Watch

If you have one eye more astute than the other, you may have noticed that "Roleux" is not how Rolex is really spelled. But if you're standing next to the entrance to a dark alley, next to a guy who is furtively looking in both directions down the street you've been walking along in sunny Caracas, Venezuela, you might not have the presence of mind to make this fine distinction.

Add to the mental overload the fact that the gentleman speaking fractured English to you is breathlessly offering to sell you what he declares is a genuine "Roleux" watch (and it is!!!) and you can understand -- and perhaps even forgive -- my former father-in-law's collapse of good sense. This was quite a few years ago, but he should have figured it out that even under the calamity the gentleman said was forcing the sale, that $30 was way too good to be true.

I was presented with the watch as a sort of 'welcome to the family' gift. Obviously it was a harbinger of things to come. The only other thing I remember from this lost in space episode is that this former father-in-law loved baseball and had his heart set on making professional baseball a life time career. But then WWII, Flying Fortresses, a stint in a German POW camp and then marriage put the kibosh on those plans. He'd lump WWII in with the circumstances that kiboshed his deal, but I know it was just marriage. He didn't marry a woman who would have put up with the economic misery of minor league baseball back in the late 40s and early 50s. She wanted the "American Dream." So he went to work for an oil company and got it for her. What a bitch my former mother-in-law was. And yet I grew up to be just like her, vain, prissy, and prone to fainting when I don't get my way.

I don't recall what ever happened to the "Roleux" watch. It pretty much kept time, so it wasn't a complete waste of $30.