Father Timex

It's been just under two years since Dad passed away, and I'm still wearing his old Timex.

I took it off his cool lifeless wrist on the day that he died, and put it on my own.  It's told the time with reasonable accuracy ever since.  A simple mechanical watch serves many purposes.  Telling the time, of course, but other purposes that have value in our digital age.  It reduces the number of times per day I feel compelled to look at my magic devil box, which is a blessing.  It ticks audibly, as the mechanism physically marks away the seconds remaining in my own mortal coil.  This feels real and tangible, an analog actuality in a vaporware age.  It does one thing well, without distraction.  These are good things.  

That's not to say there aren't challenges with an old watch.

The watch will need a new battery soon, as the Timex IndiGlow (tm) feature for nighttime timekeeping has started to dim.  It's started slowing down a little bit, requiring readjustment through the little twisty knob on the side.  Again, a new battery is all that's needed. 

The primary fail-point, though, has been the band.  It's a simple leather thing, faded and worn.  The watch lug loops have given way multiple times, the leather yielding to entropy, the machine-stitching well past its functional lifespan.  I've been tempted, each time, to replace the band.  

I mean, it's a band.  Just a strip of cheap hide.  It's not expensive.

But like everything that matters, the watch isn't just about function.  It rested on my father's wrist for decades, and the band...being organic and slightly permeable...carries with it more of him than the metal watchbody itself.  It's stained and suffused with his sweat.  Some of his DNA, no doubt, is sequestered away in the folds and cracks of that old leather, as surely as it is in my own flesh.

Letting go of the band, or so my utterly illogical sentimentality dictates, is letting of a substantial portion of that intimate reminder of him.  So what to do, when that band fails?  

Given that my leatherworking skills are non-existent, I've taken the easy route, applying a classic Dad-fix to that memento of my own father: epoxy.  Just glue it back together.  It works, right up until it doesn't.

Last week, my most recent repair failed, and the watch fell from my wrist.  Undamaged, thankfully, but the whole leather lug-loop was gone.  There was nothing left to glue, nothing left to wrap around the bar of the lug.  This, I thought ruefully, might finally be the end of the band.  I let it set for a little bit, as I mulled my options.

A fierce sentimentality can be the mother of ingenuity, and time for reflection stirred a thought.  

The band was two stitched pieces of leather, and were I to carefully slice them apart and trim away one half, I could construct a new lug-loop.  Simply slice, apply epoxy, and boom.  It'd be back on my wrist.  Why not?  If it failed, I'd just sigh and get a new band.  If it succeeded, I'd still have that soft worn remembrance snug wrapped around my arm.

So I sliced it carefully, opening up the seams of the leather.  I whittled about the edges with the blade, and then...with vise and glue and time...remade what had failed.

This Father's Day, that old Timex still rests on my wrist.

The Twilight of the Doodle

Over the last week or so, I've been taking a few hours here and there to whittle away at the amassed detritus of decades stored in our home.  Down in the unfinished area of our basement, the shelves that line the walls in the workroom and the utility room are packed full of the residue of life.  An entire box was packed high with stacks of daily preschool paintings produced by my now-adult sons.   Elsewhere were boxes going all the way back to my own childhood.  A drawing of my family that I made in fifth grade.  A painting I made in preschool.  Letters from high school friends, back when we wrote letters to one another that could be kept.  Letters from family members long passed.  That sort of thing.

As I sorted through and discarded well-worn high school papers and faded college course notebooks, I marveled at a time when such things were all done by hand.  When was the last time I wrote an entire page of text, actually wrote it, hand and pen to paper?  Or wrote a letter in my marginally legible cursive?  It's been a bit.

Even more striking than my now mostly unfamiliar penmanship were the margins, because the margins of class-notes and tests and letters alike were awash in doodles.  At a moment of distraction in class, which for scatter-brained-me there were many, I would draw.  There were geometric patterns and abstract sworls of texture.  There were faces, and scenes, and little cartoons drawn to amuse both myself and nearby classmates.  

When the mind wandered, it doodled.  It was just something that one did, and it was hardly idiosyncratic to my own modestly artistic self.  It was a common thing, a nearly universal thing, just part of being a student or a note-taker or a diarist in the late 20th century.  Interspersed in our class notes and our meeting minutes would be the images and patterns.  In that, we were carrying on a tradition that goes back as far as pen and paper, back to times medieval, when marginalia were an integral part of our thinking processes.

And I wondered: does anyone doodle anymore?  I don't, not really.

The shift in media form from notebooks to laptops completely changed the whole dynamic of writing.  I mean, sure, there are touch screens and drawing programs, but honestly?  It's an entirely different world.  If we're distracted, there are casual gaming apps to fill our time, or a bottomless stream of reels to scroll through mindlessly.  Through the "miracle" of bottomless connectivity, most of our fallow moments have been monetized and gamified into functional oblivion, as whimsy and creativity have been supplanted.

Some out there, no doubt, might bring a pad with them for the specific purpose of doodling.  Others have chosen to return to pen and paper, intentionally rediscovering handwriting as a mnemonic device.  But most of us do not.

As with so many of the tradeoffs in this brave new world, it feels like a lessening, as we forget a thing whose value we didn't recognize.

Memories, Data, and Dreaming

Yesterday, I unearthed some memories. That happens a fair amount in my wet-ware memory, as words or sights or scents serve as trigger events for a cascade of recollections across my neural net. Sometimes that's cause for a delightful reverie. Sometimes that makes me wish for the services of the Haitian.


But this remembering was different.

In puttering around straightening things up in the basement, I found an old Palm organizer. By "discovered" I don't mean it had been lost, or that it was anything other than in plain sight. It had just been set aside, as its function had been supplanted by a sequence of increasingly schmantzy smartphones. Its rechargeable batteries were depleted. It was abandoned.

But when I picked it up with the intent to perhaps recycle it, I reflexively hit the power button. And it turned on.

I noodled through the old familiar menus for a moment, and in seeing the icons, recalled that there were videos on the thing. Not in the puny onboard memory, but in a 512MB SD card that was neatly slotted into the top. As I recalled that, the charge punked into nothing, and the organizer shut down.

I popped the card out, and went downstairs to our iMac. I chunked it into the card reader that's integrated into our printer, and went a-hunting through the file menus. QuickTime managed to handle the arcane file format, and what I found were memories.

They were pixelated and crude, the output of a sub-megapixel camera, but real. Two little boys, playing in a snow fort. A fifth birthday party for the now-almost-ten youngest son. A shot of big brother walking little brother to the bus stop on his first day of kindergarten. "If you're feeling shy, or scared, don't worry," said big brother. "I'll be there."

As I meditated on these electronic recollections this morning, I wondered about the impact that this new way of remembering has on us as human creatures. Across the span of human existence, our ability to recall things across time has gone through significant change. First, there were stories, told and remembered and retold. Then, language took on symbolic form, and those stories were written...and history began.

Now, our remembering is more than just writing. It is aural and visual. We hold onto a moment, to its sounds and the play of light across a face. Voices and song and laughter still echo from a hundred years ago. Or from the faces of little children who are no longer little children.

This is still a profoundly new thing. We forget how briefly it's been around, how the last 100 years is just a tiny flicker of who we are as a species.

I wonder if that remembering will make us wiser, as the accumulated visions and images give us a stronger sense of who we were, who we were created to be, and what purpose underlies our existence.

I wonder if the accumulation of that remembering will drive us mad, as a great weight of images and thoughts pile up in our collective subconscious, building and building into a vast inchoate mass until they overwhelm us and we can no longer discern the real. Cultures, after all, do not sleep. They do not dream. So they do not sort, and do not learn.

Some combination of the both, I shouldn't wonder.