Marking Time

I got my first watch on my 6th birthday. Right after I learned how to tell time. My mom bought it for me at the government employee membership store, a kind of K-mart meets credit union kind of deal. (I still have it and at last winding, it still ran.) Perhaps not a common gift for a six-year-old, even in 1967, but it fits with my mom’s near pathological obsession with punctuality, if not mine. I loved having a watch and have worn a watch nearly every day of my life since then.

My first watch was a mechanical one that wound up as all watches did at that time. Battery powered quartz watches didn’t go mainstream until the 1970s, and I don’t think I got my first battery powered watch until around the mid-1980s. When I did, I missed the daily winding, and replacing the batteries irritated me.

Then in the late 2000s, spurred on by ebay, I rediscovered mechanical watches. I bought a few hand-wound wrist watches and some Hamilton railroad-style pocket watches. Some of them were non-functional on arrival but I found ‘watch doctor’ Mark Siriani in Kane, Pa. to whom I could send them. He fixed them and sent them back for a pretty reasonable cost.

Finally, I bought a Bulova Accutron Chronograph (stopwatch) with an Automatic movement. An automatic is similar to a hand-wound watch, except that it has a rotor inside that moves as you move your arms and keeps the movement wound without you having to turn the crown. There is no battery or external energy source. I loved that watch and wore it nearly every day until in my final days at the Apple Store in May 2015, the Apple Watch was released, and I grabbed the first model with my employee discount.

Though nowhere near as aesthetically pleasing as a mechanical watch, the Apple Watch was useful in so many ways. Since then, Apple has continued to add useful features like Apple Pay (pay for stuff by tapping the watch) unlocking your phone when you are wearing a mask, unlocking your computer without having to enter the password, fitness tracking, and controlling the music and lights.

A watch is one of the few kinds of ‘jewelry’ that many men feel comfortable wearing, along with cufflinks and maybe a wedding ring. There are so many kinds and styles of watches that it is easy to find one that expresses the identity you want to signal. Field watches for the rugged outdoors man, elegant dress watches for the man of taste (or dollars), and divers for people who don’t dive but wish they did. For a few years, my Apple Watch suited the identity I hoped to project (cutting edge tech savy Apple Fan Boy) but then something happened: Apple watches became so common place as to be completely unremarkable and the traditional watch, already under siege from the “I can just look at my phone to see the time,” mind set, sank closer to oblivion as the few people who still wore them switched to smart watches.

And I missed my mechanical watches! I missed the beauty of them and the artistry of an object that tracks the passage of time through the movement of physical hands across a dial, and of course the small opportunity for personal expression that the choice of a non-smart watch offers.

So, a few weeks ago, I started wearing my old watches again, my mechanical watches on the traditional left wrist and the Apple Watch (for all its handy benefits) on the right.

Do I feel kind of geeky wearing two watches? Yeah, a bit. Do I care? Not that much.

I tried wearing my Apple Watch higher on my forearm with the face turned inward but it gave me a rash on my skin so that didn’t work well. I tried it on my ankle one day, but it was awkward asking Siri questions. (Imagine Maxwell Smart speaking into his shoe without taking it off first.) So, the right wrist is where it will stay. The hottest tech on my right and oldest school on the left.

Along with my fountain pens and my Bates Model B stapler that makes its own staples from a spool of Brass wire, the windup watch has returned to daily service. It doesn’t keep time any better than my Apple Watch but it also doesn’t pester me with constant reminders to stand up, exercise or go to bed. There is something to be said for a watch that treats you like an adult instead of like a 6-year-old.