Complications

How often do we hear of something once and then maybe not for years after?

A few years back, my husband and I kept passing Franck Mueller's watch boutique with the sign "Master of Complications."  Since we had enough complications in our lives, we debated what it could have meant and did it mean solutions to problems.

I could stand it no more. We entered the store and politely asked the guard what it meant. It was his first day on the job. He didn't know, but he referred me to a woman somewhere in her thirties, dressed in black.

I am sure she knew we weren't clients in seconds. My five Euro watch bought on at a marché would have clued her in that we might not be potential clients for a six-figure timepiece. To make sure, I told her we weren't buying, we just wanted to understand what complications in the context of the sign meant.

She treated us as valued guests anyway, inviting us to sit and explaining with examples. A complication is each layer of complexity a watch offers such as the ability to set day/date displays, stopwatches, alarms, automatic winding. The Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega 4 has 36 complications, 1483 components and 1000-year calendar.

We thanked her.

I didn't give it much more thought. A complication went back to being things like double scheduling, a paper not found, a spice needed for a recipe not in the closet. Until yesterday, when I was reading The Grand Complication, bought at the English library sale in Geneva.

At first, I thought the complication was the speaker's French wife who disapproved of his second job, his impotence or his problems with his day job as a librarian. About 100 pages into it, a new "complication" arrived--the search for Marie Antoinette's watch. The meaning switched back to that day in Geneva when we talked with the woman in the watch boutique.

Whenever I know something not obvious to everyone, I suffer a smugness fit. Like the time I recognized a street in the old part of Damascus from a news cast where I'd been not once, but three times. I had a quick attack of smugness, but quickly recovered to get on with my daily life and get on with the complications of normal life such as Sherlock wanting to be walked when I was in the middle of something.