AFTER MY SUCCESS with selling our small fleet of cars, I moved on to my watch collection. Unlike the old Scott, who Joan said changed his watch almost every day, I’d become a creature of habit and had been perfectly happy wearing the same one for the past several months, which was normal for someone with a brain injury. My lightweight Citizen Eco-Drive Skyhawk had a comfortable black rubber strap, and, being solar-powered, it was also convenient because I never had to change the battery.
Reading online about the features and widely variable market values of my thirteen timepieces, I learned that the Skyhawk was a favorite among pilots because it told the time in forty-three cities worldwide and also calculated fuel time and flying speed.
Joan couldn’t remember when or where I’d gotten the watches other than she’d given me the Chase Durer Trackmaster for my birthday. She did say, however, that every time I’d bought or sold an aircraft for a client, we’d go shopping—Joan for clothes or shoes and me for a new watch. But because none of them held special meaning for me now, I saw no reason not to liquidate them to generate some household income. Joan was doing her part; I wanted to do mine.
Building on my car sales experience, I researched the watches’ wholesale, retail, and private sale prices, averaged them, then listed them on a legal pad along with what I originally paid. After deciding to keep three of them for a little variety—the Skyhawk; the Trackmaster, which had a stainless-steel strap, lit up at night, and contained a stopwatch; and the IWC, a dress watch with a leather strap—I crossed them off the list and asked Joan what she thought of it.
“Oh, you made up a spreadsheet,” she said.
“What is that?” I asked.
“This form you made, comparing the cost of each watch, is called a spreadsheet.”
But she still hadn’t answered my question. “Okay,” I said, “but what do you think of the list?”
“This looks good, but what are you going to do with it?”
Presenting my action plan, I said I would put ads on Craigslist and sell the remaining pieces to a retail store that sold used jewelry, aiming to get as close as possible to the current selling price.
Joan cautioned me to take safety measures so I didn’t get robbed or scammed. Apparently we’d almost got caught up in a Craigslist caper in 2007 when we’d posted an ad to sell one of Grant’s motorcycles. The buyer insisted on paying us with a $5,000 cashier’s check for a $3,000 motorcycle, asking for the $2,000 balance in cash. Luckily, the bank determined the check was fraudulent before we completed the transaction.
Joan and I agreed I should meet potential Craigslist buyers at my office building to keep our home address secret.
I was amazed how many watches were for sale on Craigslist, and although I wondered if I had too much competition, I forged ahead. I listed three watches, including a new Rolex Explorer II and a barely worn Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean, both of which I priced at $4,000. My research showed that Rolexes held their value better than any of my other watches, so I was confident I could get my asking prices. The Omega, which I’d purchased for $5,550, had no scratches but felt like I had a boat anchor around my wrist.
I waited for the buyers to show up, but no one called for several days, and, even after the calls began to trickle in, I quickly grew frustrated with people lowballing my asking prices and failing to show up for appointments. I wondered if I was wasting my time. A week later I got a call from an ASU college student who was interested in the Rolex.
“The pictures look really good,” he said. “I’d like to see it in person.”
We arranged to meet within the hour in my office building lobby, where I knew they had security cameras in case he tried to rob me or accuse me of robbing him. When he arrived, he was in his early twenties, blond, tall, and well groomed in a polo shirt and khakis. In other words, he looked as if he could afford my watch.
As we sat on the black leather couches, he put on the watch and stared at it longingly as if he were trying to find a reason not to buy it. I wondered if that’s how I’d felt when I’d bought it or if I’d been too spoiled to appreciate its handsomeness.
Finally he sprang to his feet, saying, “I want it, but will you take $3,500 for it?”
“No,” I said, “I appreciate it, but I’m confident that this watch will sell due to the condition it’s in.” I started putting it back in the box, which seemed to prompt the young man to go for it.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll pay the $4,000, but it’s more than I wanted to spend.”
After I told him I only took cash, he left to go to the bank, promising to return in half an hour. Meanwhile, I went up to my office to make copies of the sales receipt and registration for my records, and sure enough, he came back as promised. After he counted forty one-hundred-dollar bills into my hand, we shook on the deal, and he left with a big smile.
It was nice to see that this watch had brought him happiness when it wasn’t doing anything for me but serving as a reminder of my previous excess.
Thank God I didn’t owe any money on these watches. What kind of greedy man was I, needing to surround myself with all these cars and watches when I’ve seen so many people on the news going hungry, living with no phone or running water, not just in other parts of the world, but here in the United States too?
I was proud that I’d been successful enough to buy these luxuries, but when I considered how much I’d indulged myself, I felt nauseated.
How can there be so much difference between what some people have and others don’t have? And how many poor people could I have helped rather than spending money on these items that I didn’t need?
I wondered how I’d gotten so off track, trying to build wealth instead of focusing on what was truly important—my family. Was that partly why I’d missed noticing that my son had started down the wrong path in life? Maybe I’d been too preoccupied to see what was right in front of me.
Several weeks later I sold the Omega Seamaster to a man from Tennessee. After we talked on the phone, he agreed to wire the money into my account and trusted that I would send him the watch. He paid my asking price and an additional fifty dollars for shipping. When he received the watch, he called to tell me that it was in better shape than the photos had indicated, which seemed to be an unexpectedly pleasant surprise. “There’s only one small scratch on the clasp,” he said, astounded.
“I know, I didn’t wear the watch,” I replied.
“It’s just very refreshing that somebody put a good product on Craigslist,” he said.
As happy as I was to hear this, it made me realize that I needed to be more careful in the future. Before the accident, Joan said, I’d become bitter and untrusting due to some bad experiences in the business world. Right after the accident, I had felt frightened of people unless I knew everything about them, but now I’d become almost too trusting.
I was unable to sell the third watch on Craigslist, so I decided to take it and the other eight watches to two retail stores in Scottsdale and take the highest offer. By my calculations, the timepieces were worth around $22,000. I knew I wouldn’t get that much; I was willing to take less if I could complete the sale quickly for close to that price.
A buyer at the Estate Watch & Jewelry Company offered me $19,500 for the bunch. I told him I needed to think about it and would call him later that day, then got in my car and drove to the other store, Scottsdale Fine Jewelers, which was about five miles away.
After chatting with the owner and his wife about the sad shape of the aviation business and my desire to convert the watches into cash, he offered me $20,800.
I stepped outside to consult with Joan by phone. “That seems pretty close to what we talked about,” she said. “See if you can get a few hundred dollars more.”
I went back inside and asked for $21,100, and we finally settled on $21,000.
“Okay,” I said, “we’ve got a deal.”
I had to say I felt relieved to get rid of these unnecessary items. I also felt a keen sense of satisfaction about pulling my own weight around the house and improving our financial security.
With our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary approaching, I decided it would be nice to renew our vows like I’d seen people do on TV. Joan had confided that she was worried I would wake up one day and want to run off with someone else because I couldn’t remember all our years together. Knowing that my love for her had been growing stronger every day, I thought this gesture would help her see how committed I was to spending the rest of my life with her.
“Our twenty-fifth anniversary is coming up, and we’re going to Hawaii. Do you still want to renew our vows like we planned before the accident?” I asked, expecting her to jump at the chance to do this during our upcoming vacation.
Joan got quiet and paused before she answered. She looked as if she felt backed into a corner and had to decide whether to hurt my feelings or be bluntly honest with me. “I don’t feel that you know what love is yet,” she said. “It might be a good idea to wait until you know what it means.”
“But I do love you. I don’t know how I felt before the accident, but I know how I feel now, and I know how I feel when I’m not with you, and this has to be love,” I said, still reeling from the shock of what she’d said. “Why don’t you want to remarry me?”
Reading my feelings of rejection, she grabbed me and tried to soften the blow. “It’s not that I don’t want to remarry you. I love you, and I have known you for most of my life, but you’ve only known me for a few months. I think it would be better if we waited until you know for sure that you still want to be married to me.”
I told her that I may not know everything about her, but I must have loved her for the past twenty-eight years or we wouldn’t still be married. I slowly realized, however, that she might be right. Maybe I did need to get to know her better, and we could renew our vows at a more appropriate time. She seemed to have guided me in the right direction up to this point. Who was I to start doubting her now?
We did end up going to Hawaii, but we didn’t renew our vows. Instead, she spent our anniversary telling me, minute by minute, what we’d been doing on our wedding day twenty-five years earlier, until we fell asleep in each other’s arms that night. I could feel my love for her growing stronger every day.
Now that I’d sold off what I could, I wondered what else I could do to help out financially. We were still hoping that my memory would return, but even if it did, I wasn’t sure I would be able to pick up the jet business again. After all my work to make it successful, the company still had value, even without me at its helm, so in the worst case, we figured we could sell off its assets and client base.
In March we managed to get out of the last five months of our office lease, which saved us $5,000 a month, but we thought it best to keep the business alive in some form. So we switched over to a virtual office service for only $200 a month, which gave us a business address, phone and fax services, and a place to meet with clients if necessary. Calls to our business number were still answered by the same reception desk, but they were now relayed to voicemail; faxes went to my eFax, which I could access from home or anywhere else I could get on a computer. At first Joan handled all the callbacks because I didn’t know enough to talk to anyone. When I felt better, we decided, I would start calling some people myself.
I was desperately looking for a way to take control of my recovery and my destiny, find a way to empower myself, and develop a plan of action—to find a feeling of purpose when I looked in the mirror each morning instead of the hopelessness, despair, loneliness, and helplessness that stared back at me. Knowing how bad and alone I felt and how much I wanted help but couldn’t find it, I figured there must be others out there who felt the same way—people who had suffered brain injuries or other traumas.
Maybe my pseudocelebrity status of having played in the NFL and becoming a successful aviation entrepreneur will give me an entrée to get people to let me help them.
Although Joan kept telling me how successful I’d been, I was still struggling to comprehend what “success” meant and what it felt like, along with many other emotions I didn’t understand and had to ask Joan to put a label on so she could help me figure out what I was feeling and why.
“What is success?” I asked her.
“It has many different facets,” Joan said. “Some people relate it to money. Some people relate it to having a healthy family, happiness, raising good children, being productive in society, and being with the one person you love.”
Knowing that we’d done charity work to help others in the past, I hoped that this newly revealed path might create a sense of success in me, which could then lead to further success.
Why not help others and myself at the same time?
“Maybe this happened for a reason,” Joan told me. “Maybe God has a purpose for you, and this is it.”
I still didn’t understand what God was, but for now, that sounded like a pretty good affirmation. As I searched for a new career, I vowed to be more conscious of how I could help others in whatever job I chose. I only wished I knew how to help my son.