Keeping Time With Dad

An Analog Lesson for a Digital World

I’ve always been fascinated with time. I suspect that my interest in time is what brought on my interest in history. I have a collection of timepieces including one made after a medieval sundial you aim at the sun, about the size of quarter. I have hour glasses of different durations. If you worked with me long enough I used to give people two things: a hand-made, thumb sized compass and a spring wound watch. Why the latter? The Soviet Union used to issue their soldiers these because so many of their soldiers came from the hinterland where clocks weren’t that important. By issuing a spring wound watch the soldier had to get in the habit of keeping time—he had to maintain the watch by winding, which made him appreciate the importance of the elements of time; duration, sequence, frequency, and opportunity. A spring wound watch reminds you that you are responsible for how you keep time. Along with a compass, a person has to do two things mentally and manually; orient to direction and keep time. Most of life’s problems have to do with direction and time or timing. Time is the most valuable commodity in the universe because you have a limited amount, and you have no idea when your time will end. You can’t spend or save time; it’s not money. Time is a vessel. You can fill or fulfill time; just put anything in time and turn it into a trash can or you can fulfill your time and make your life a piece of art. Of course you can buy a machine to keep your time and find your direction for you. A GPS system will automatically spit out directions and even coordinates. A digital watch will show you the exact time, say “7:53:45.” But unlike their analog predecessors, there is no sense of the relatedness of time or direction. When you keep time with an analog watch you know its 1:15pm not only from the location of the hands but from the hands relationship to the rest of the field of time, the face of the watch. It’s this broader connection that explains why in the past the face of an analog watch is just as important a design feature as the hands. The same is true of a compass. A GPS can tell you the exact degrees but it doesn’t relate you to the context. What else is there? What other directions are available? It’s no wonder then that when I work with people I end up asking them questions that often can be summed up as “What’s your direction?” and “How are you fulfilling your time?” Time and direction aren’t just digital data but are the deepest connections you have with your life and the lives of others. It’s telling that some people now cannot read a compass or an analog watch. The time tells them, the direction orients them, instead of them keeping time or finding direction. It’s seems like a little thing but it has larger consequences.

It won’t come as any surprise then that when I was asked what I would like for my 10^th birthday, my answer was a pocket watch. Even as a little kid I loved my Great Grandpa Jones’s Gruen pocket watch, which is now mine. Grandpa Jones would pull out his watch and dangle it from his watch chain and say, “Here boy, hang on to that.” I loved its sound and I’d sit quietly, curled up in my hand close to my ear. By age 10 I thought having a pocket watch of my own would be different, classy, fun to carry. Back then, even a dress pant still had a distinctively separate pocket for a pocket watch, something now found in jeans as a stylistic throwback.

Dad being Dad, I’m sure had a pow wow with Mom about the wisdom of giving such an expensive item to a 10 year old. Asking for a pocket watch to me was like asking for a horse or a trip to Disneyland. Wishes were fun and pleasant, like picking out toys for Christmas in the J.C. Penny catalog, but you didn’t get them. The fun was the imagining. However to my great surprise on my 10^th birthday my parents presented me with a “Big Ben” pocket watch purchased at the local discount city that was a precursor to a Walmart, offering everything from groceries to hardware and clothing. The watch cost $10. Now that needs some perspective. My Dad was a barber who in 1967 earned, in good week about $45. With tips, he might have anywhere between an extra $5-10 a week. To earn that money Dad worked 11 hours a day between 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. His tips made up our family emergency/vacation fund and we often had to live off of it. That watch cost about 22% of his weekly wage. In today’s money, it would be about $109. The watch cost half of a visit to the doctors, which is why we seemed to always be running a bill with the doctor. To me it didn’t matter that he bought the watch from a cardboard display next to the fishing tackle in the store. To me it was just as special as if he had bought it from Tiffany’s.

I’d had the watch for about a month and Dad asked if he could borrow it. I think he wanted to decide whether to get one for himself. Anyway I did, and didn’t think any more about it until Saturday, wash day in the our house, when he came to me with the bad news that he’d forgotten to take it out of his pocket and Mom had run it through the wash. I’m sure my expression showed my heart visibly sinking, and Dad said, “Let me see if I can fix it.” We did that sort of thing back then, I still do. If you found anything broken you toted it home to see it you could make it usable. I got the watch back with a huge set of vice grip dents in the back of the case. It ran and who looks at the back of the watch anyway, right? At least that’s what I told myself, but my beautiful pocket watch was as crushed as I felt inside. But when you grow up without a lot you learn to be happy with what you can get. Don’t think about second helpings at dinner let alone dream of dessert.

About six months later Dad asked me what time it was. I didn’t know. “Why aren’t you carrying your pocket watch?” This was his real question. I told him that it stopped running about three months after he fixed it. “Let me see if I can fix it again.” A couple of weeks went by and Dad came to me. “Son, I’m sorry about ruining your pocket watch,” and with that he handed another whole new watch. I know how much that cost him; a total of $20. I wonder where he got it. What did he and Mom do without to make it possible? What a lesson in integrity and humility what fathers should do for their children. I’ve had that watch ever since. For 58 years I’ve used it to keep time. I have other nicer pocket watches, but the “Big Ben”…this huge almost hockey puck thick nickel plated time piece, is the one that reminds me of all the time Dad and I shared and how we kept time together. I stopped last year and I’ve had a devil of a time trying to find someone to fix it. Any repair will be far more than the monetary worth of the watch, but whatever it costs in money will never exceed the value it’s given me in keeping time with my Dad.