A man who wears a watch conveys reliability and a great concern for punctuality.
For my thirteenth birthday, my grandmother gave me a watch. It was a Timex. The face of it was tiny black and brown checks. The hands, the numerals, the framing and the tiny button used to wind it were silver. What was particularly cool about it was that there were two little displays on the right side of the face. One was for the day of the week, and the other was for the date of the month. In order to ensure that the date and the day aligned with the calendar, at the beginning of most months I had to go through an elaborate winding routine that involved tricking the date forward by going past the 12 hand but stopping before reaching the 2 hand. If this procedure was performed in the morning, as it usually was, it required winding around the face of the watch twice because the first go-round, as interpreted by the watch’s innards, was noon, not midnight. As I recall, the date changed at about 10 minutes before midnight, the day of the week at a little past 1:00 in the morning. It’s breathtaking, really, to ponder the hardships we endured in the 1970s and 1980s. That watch needed to be wound – in person, by the way, not remotely – each and every night. If it wasn’t wound it did not work.
That’s the only watch I’ve ever owned, and it’s the only one I intend to ever own. I love the concept of marking time but I do not like the feeling of buckling something onto my wrist, so the watch remains in a box tucked into a drawer as it has for more than two decades now. I like my watch because it was a gift from my grandmother. I also like it because it’s something of a relic. It requires a little bit of knowledge – rather than announcing in exact numbers that it’s 5:32, it requires that you understand, based on the fact that the short bar is halfway between the five and the six and the long bar is a couple of paces past the six (toward the seven, or, in another relic-y term, clockwise), that it is in fact 5:32. I wonder, as I write this, how many years will pass before the youngsters become so accustomed to the blue, green or red digital numbers, usually with a dot or absence of a dot to differentiate between a.m. and p.m. that they look up at traditional clocks – the round kind – in town squares across the land in utter confusion.
And I wonder how many years will pass before the wearing of a watch is no longer associated with punctuality. That’s because even though I haven’t worn a watch since the last century, I do indeed have a great concern for punctuality. Or maybe I should rephrase that: I have a great disdain for those with no concern for punctuality. I live in a world where time is everywhere. In the lower right corner of my computer screen there is a clock. There’s a clock on my new boom box. There’s a clock on the stove and another one, four feet away, on the coffee maker. There’s a clock on my bookshelf and one on top of my dresser and there is a vocal clock inside my telephone that tells me the day, date, hour and minute that someone has left a message. Even though I do not wear a watch and even though I do not own a cell phone, I am surrounded by time, immersed in its passing, and yet I have an uncanny knack for collecting people who are perpetually, habitually five, 10, 12 minutes late, as a matter of course, for anything and everything from conference calls to coffee dates, which I’m starting to think is perhaps my grandmother’s spirit chiding me for not wearing the only watch I’ve ever owned.
