I mentioned a while ago that I’ve been getting into watches. It’s a total pandemic hobby; something I dug into when I couldn’t leave the house. Over the course of a few posts, I thought I’d march through the trajectory of this insanity in a logical fashion, so you can witness the birth of an obsession.

I need to take you back in time to December 2019, when I had but three watches stowed in a box in my closet.

There was a time when I wore a watch every morning when I went to work in the big city. This is the watch. A cheap-ass Timex that I must have bought in my hometown in New Jersey for about $15 at the Kmart. Ugliest pot metal case and bezel you’ve ever seen. Scratched and dinged as hell, because I’m bad with watches. It was fine for what I needed. The classic Indiglo feature lit the thing up like a radioactive wafer whenever I wanted to check the time while I was at the movies. (I used to go to a lot of movies, in actual theaters, back in the day.) When I was living in Italy for a year, I liked that this watch displayed the 24-hour clock that is so popular in Europe. That inner ring of indices also helped me calculate the time back home in the USA. But I stopped wearing the watch when I got back to the states because by then I had started obsessively checking my mobile phone for the time. The Timex got tossed in a drawer. The battery died, and no one cared, least of all me.

The second of my unworn, closet watches is this one. It was presented to me as a gift from Denise’s grandmother when Denise and I first got married. The watch belonged to Denise’s grandfather, Fausto, and it’s got a wonderful back story. The late Fausto bought the watch in Germany on a trip to visit his first grandchild—my very own Denise—shortly after she was born. Denise’s dad was U.S. military, stationed abroad in Augsburg, Germany. I don’t know if Fausto had ever been out of the country, but on that joyful trip he picked up this watch at a Bucherer jewelry shop, probably in Munich, where they still have a location. Watches that are purchased to celebrate the birth of a child are known in the fandom as, yes, “birth watches.” They are often presented to that child when they reach adulthood. Yet despite this charming history, I never really wore the watch. I didn’t quite understand how to keep it wound. Grandma gave me vague instructions; I was to shake it in my hand as if I were a kid at Hogwarts weaving an incantation. It was fussy, and also old, and I was afraid to break it if I wore it. At Scholastic, I was always smacking my wristwatch into walls or doors as I walked around the office. That’s why I liked my Timex. Takes a licking, and keeps on ticking, right? Fausto’s watch also came on a clingy old Spiedel Twist-O-Flex bracelet that ate my wrist flesh every time I pulled it on. Upon closer inspection I discovered that the band was also chewing into the watch lugs. If I wore it, I might inadvertently saw the lugs off. But I didn’t have the patience to figure out how to change out the bracelet. Into the closet it went. (The day I’m writing this, it was announced that Rolex bought Bucherer. Nice, but that still doesn’t make this a Rolex watch.)

The third watch was another weird family heirloom. Here’s a pic of the dial and guts, but I’ll save the longer origin story for another time. It’s a doozy. Suffice to say that this is a pocket watch presented to me as a gift from my father. Strangely, though, the watch was not my father’s, nor did it belong to his father. It dates to 1908, and was one of millions built by the Waltham Watch Co. in Waltham, Massachusetts. That story alone is amazing, and I hope to share that with you in the future.

As Shakespeare would say, In Joe’s closet where we lay our scene. Three watches, interesting yet unworn. One’s got a dead battery. One is fussy to operate but sorta keeps time. And a 115-year-old pocket watch deader than Jacob Marley.

And Joe, our protagonist, is okay with this shit! He doesn’t care a whit about them. As far as he’s concerned, when he needs to know the time, he pulls out his Cupertino glassbox and peeks at the screen.

Poor schmuck doesn’t know what’s about to happen. But hey, 2020 is on the horizon, and none of us do.