Timepieces

The marking of our days is all our own

I had heard he was good at what he did. And so I stood in his small shop before his glass case of watches with an antique timepiece in my hand.

“I understand you are an expert with these old beauties,” I said.

The watchmaker smiled and through a jeweler’s eyepiece he gave my newly acquired 1950s Bulova wristwatch a closer look.

“It could use a little love,” he said. “A new stem and a cleaning."

For a year, I had tried. But using a smartwatch had turned out to be more than I had needed or wanted. Being intensely aware of everything in life—steps, heartbeat, sports notifications, text messages, body temperature—only added to the stress of everyday living. So I ditched it for a 70-year old, hand-winding wristwatch, purchased through a collector in Pittsburgh. Analog. Old school. A small timepiece that did one thing, told the time.

“My father had a Timex,” I said. “Stainless steel band, a workingman’s watch. I have it somewhere.”

“They were good watches back in the day,” he said. “What you have here is white gold. Bulova still makes great watches. The old ones, like this, are beauties.”

I handed it over. He said he’d have it for me in a week.

Back home that afternoon, I searched for my father’s watch. Nightstands. Dresser drawers. Boxes in closets. I knew I had it, but as I have done before, I’m certain I’d put it someplace for safekeeping. A little too safe. Too safe to find.

During the search, however, I remembered another old watch, one I had had for more than 40 years. The gold-plated pocket watch had been a gift from my parents for my high school graduation. The outside plate has intricate details of galloping horses. Roman numerals make up the white face, the hands long and Gothic in style. But when I put in my palm, those hands fell from their center, tumbling to the bottom of the crystal. This old watch, too, is now with the watch expert for a “little love.”

What beauty there is in old watches. They hold memories of times past, yet with care, they march froward to new moments, minutes, hours, and days. What once had been is somehow wound forever inside the watch’s DNA. In a way, the midnight hour of decades ago remains the very same midnight hour today. The dawn and dusk of yesterday are today’s dawn and dusk. Different. Yet newly visioned.

Yeats’ poem “The Coming Wisdom of Time” considers how at one point of our lives, in youth, time is full of possibility, and yet as it passes, we realize it is but an illusion.

Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.

The theme of time in art is not new, and in some ways laden with tired metaphors. But what is never false is that time is fleeting. We calculate and measure it with our watches, and with our smartwatches, consider time’s every nuance of our every being. Still, I like to think that our watches are instead reminding us of the present, of right now.

The next early morning after sending off the watches for repair, I made coffee, enjoyed the sun brightening the leaves on the magnolia tree in the backyard, and considered spending time at my desk to write. Time to write. My words would be my watch, I thought. What a lovely way to consider time, measuring it by what we do, where we go, how we live.

Yeats was on my mind the day before. That morning, it was Dylan Thomas. His words in “Fern Hill” ask us to fill the days we have with our very best lives, and to sing loudly despite being bound by manmade measurements

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea

I stepped through the door to walk to the shed where I write and out of habit, glanced at my wrist, a bare and naked wrist, a wrist without a timepiece, a wrist of hair, and bones beneath skin where veins carry red blood from a pumping heart that held a finite number of beats within a single lifetime.

And I thought again about where I might find my father’s watch.