Watches: I don’t wear one anymore. I haven’t in years since the Anne Taylor my mother bought me duty-free on a plane to England lost its stem winder and my Palm Pilot took over its timekeeping duties. I’ve moved from Palm to iPhone and find my need to tell time is still satisfied by my phone.
That might be different if I worked at a job that required I keep regular hours. Instead, I’m a freelancer, and daytime oozes into nighttime in my office. Several years ago, when I was working at getting the hours to qualify for my therapist’s license, I needed a watch. The therapeutic hour of fifty minutes–which must, as part of the gestalt of the therapeutic process, be followed precisely–demanded that I know just how many of those fifty minutes remained. It was a matter of choreographing the session that demanded such timekeeping. But I left that job before I found a watch that would enable me to surreptitiously check the time, so the issue was settled that way.
Just because I don’t wear a watch doesn’t mean I don’t own watches. I do–a goodly number of them. They’re all older models, some actually vintage, like the one my mother gave my father on his 4oth birthday. I wore that for years,, until the Anne Taylor actually, and if I ever do need a watch again, I’ll have it repaired to wear (the stem winder again, I seem to be hard on those). I have the watch my mother gave me back in college, a teeny tiny thing that’s far too small for my presbyopic eyes to read. And I have a motley collection of early 20th century watches that I’ve collected just because I like watches.
They say that people who collect watches do so because they’re trying to control time, to avoid death perhaps. I don’t know that that’s true of me, but dare I tell you of another watch I keep? It was the watch my father kept and wore from his brother, Gilbert, who died back in the early 60s. It was the watch my father was wearing when he died, almost twenty years ago. It still has his schmutz (the stuff that comes from sweat and body cells) in the crevices of the band. I’m thinking that’s exactly what I’d need if I ever want to clone him.
Jane Gassner
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