Time is of the Essence

“I am bionic man.”

It was three in the morning and I was thinking this because I was strapping a watch to my wrist. “I am strapping a time-keeping device to my arm,” I said, “and I’ve done it everyday for at least 15 years.” My sleeplessness was due to the fact that I was not feeling well, so I was moving my resting quarters to the futon in the music room to keep from waking my wife. The watch has an alarm built in, which would get me up in time for work. As I pushed the little metal prongs that produced lights, beeps, and a wake-up time of 5:30, I mumbled again, “I’m like 1/1000th machine.”

Hey, I realize how cliché this is to begin with, and millions of people are much closer to being classified as bionic people than I am. I mean, I don’t have an internal pacemaker in my chest or a cell phone clipped to my ear, nor can I operate a PS2 or N64 controller like it is some extension of my body. But at three in the morning, I think about the dumbest things in the weirdest way.

And I did begin to wonder about it. When did I institute watch-wearing and why? The watch I had on my wrist now is comfortable enough that I just might be able to drift back off to sleep, but as a kid my watch-wearing episodes were always thwarted by the discomfort of having it on my arm.

Mom gave me my first watch when I was in Kindergarten, probably as a way to teach me time-telling skills. It was also about the time that mom put a fat old log, a box of nails, and a 16-ounce hammer on the back porch and told us we could hit nails into the log as much as I wanted. And I wanted. I nearly gave that log a metal sheathing while unknowingly building gross-motor skills. Anyway, I loved the first watch; it had a tiny white analog face with miniscule black hands and band and silver trim. I wore it for quite a while on my right arm because I am right-handed and it made sense to me that the right arm should get all the privileges. But, it was not perfectly comfortable and I never really needed to know what time it was. I’m sure it wasn’t very long before that watch disappeared.

Throughout elementary school, though, I always wanted watches. I would use my allowance to buy a cheap, black plastic digital watch at K-Mart for around three or four dollars. I especially liked digital watches that had a timer feature. It would always last for a few weeks or months; I would forget to put it on sometimes and then the watch would disappear.

When I was ten, Dad told me that I should be wearing my watch on my left arm, which I tried and found to be uncomfortable and counter-intuitive. Dad wore his the opposite way than I did—on his left arm with the watch pressed against the inside of his wrist. He would have to turn his hand palm-up in order to see the watch’s face. There is a picture of me somewhere in my Cub Scout uniform holding a hamster, and you can read the time on my black plastic watch that is strapped to my right arm. It was a little after four in the afternoon, if I remember correctly. But I digress.

So how do people develop the habit of wearing a watch so faithfully? 100 years ago, pocket watches were primarily status symbols and wristwatches were for women only. Some men back then actually said they would wear a skirt before they wore a wristwatch. However, handy time-keeping devices were becoming increasingly useful in war tactics, so by the time World War I came around, soldiers almost universally wore wristwatches. With a little advertising work by the Rolex company, it was a short step from soldier wartime essential to everyday fashion. I guess that’s why you see camouflage in Wal-Mart and bright yellow Humvees on Main Street.

Status symbols and soldier idolatry. So now it is Saturday morning and I am surrounded by time. The computer monitor has it in the lower right corner, the phone reports it, and believe it or not my VCR is always set to the right time. Despite all this, I have already habitually strapped on my wristwatch even though I have not taken the time to put on some pants yet. It is 5:17 am.