DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS [W, 4-12-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS [W, 4-12-23]

 

Fortunately, the Crumble Bums met only three days after the clocks went forward an hour to accommodate DST. Thus I had to use my brain to adjust the time on my wrist watch for only 3 days. My fingers and brain are less nimble all the time. I never remember how to reset my watch when DST and EST exchange. But Charlie is a Crumble Bum. As I drank coffee, he set my wrist watch forward an hour for me.

In a way, it was Charlie’s own fault, that he had to adjust my wristwatch to DST. Katie invited us to the Matson family Thanksgiving dinner, which was only about 3 weeks after we had changed from DST to EST. That became a topic of conversation with the 12 people there. Thus it became known that I had not been able to adjust my wrist watch and was just setting the time back an hour in my brain when I looked at it. So Charlie made my watch read right.

Younger people will say, “Why are you using a wrist watch, anyway? Just look at your phone.”

Well, I do have a phone, but it’s like using a pocket watch. I have to pull it out of a shirt pocket or pants pocket to look at it. Not so with a wrist watch. It is always, immediately, in view. More importantly, it shows that I am one of the cool kids.

When I was thirteen, getting a wrist watch for a Methodist boy was almost like a bar mitzvah for a Jewish boy, although I had no idea then what a bar mitzvah was. A clock on your wrist was a rite of passage, a statement that you were grown up enough that you had to care about what time it was.

It also meant that you had saved enough money from the dollar bills relatives sent for birthdays and Christmas that you could afford a gold, rectangular watch, with gold hands, and a discreet gold “Elgin” on the face, and a band that was leathery. Enough to drive the girls wild. If they bothered to look at you.

There were no digital watches then. Nothing with a battery. Watches weren’t tiny calculators. They just showed you the time… if you wound them up

We teens certainly did not forget to wind our watches, because that was part of the mystique. We didn’t wind at the logical times of the day, bedtime or rising, for no one would see. Watch winding was a public event. We wound at lunch time, arm held high.

The kids who did not have wrist watches made fun of us by looking at their own bare wrists and saying, “What time is it? Oh, three freckles after a hair.” We didn’t care. We knew they were just jealous because we were so cool.

Now I am old. I don’t need a wrist watch to show that I’m cool. I have wrinkles for that. Or even to know what time it is, for I have no place I have to be “on time.” Although old people do have to check the watch often, to see if it is time to eat again.

But being old I am forgetful. It’s likely that if my wrist watch is not set to the correct time zone and DST or EST, I’ll be off by an hour end up eating at the wrong time. Thanks to Charlie, I shall not starve.

John Robert McFarland