Dear Editor,
It’s all a matter of time.
Twice every year for the past decade, I have a little chuckle to myself at the expense of Bill, my late husband. Actually I probably had a few chuckles at his expense when he was still alive, too. He was a fun guy to be with.
But this day every March is special, as is its counterpart every November. It is the day we change our clocks and watches back to Daylight Savings Time. i.e. we run around the house before bed turning all the hands or clicking all the buttons on our time pieces to ensure we get that extra hour of sunshine every day, promised by Sir Sanford Flemming back in the mid-1880s.
The joke is, every year, around three or four in the afternoon, I used to say to Bill, “You’d better get started. You only have til 2 a.m. tomorrow morning to get your job done.” At which time he’d give me that exasperated husband look that they all perfect during their pre-wedding stags, shake his head, and with a wry smile of his own, continue watching his show or reading his book.
You see, Bill collected watches. In our walk-in closet, a whole shelf was devoted to all the time pieces he had accumulated over the 30 years that I knew him and probably others that had appeared before me. He wasn’t a collector of expensive watches. He was not invited to the annual Rolex Dealers’ Conference in New York to ooh and awe over watches that start at half a million dollars and go up.
No. His watches came from the $10 kiosks that sprung up along the centre walkways of all the malls in the 1980s. We could not make it from one end of Pacific Centre to the other without stopping at every display of anything with hands and faces that ticked, chimed or went ding dong. And we never made it home empty handed.
Actually, that’s where I bought him his first grandfather clock. One of the kiosks had little 4 ½-inch, battery-operated replicas, complete with pendulum and weights. He’d occasionally mentioned that he’d like to have a grandfather clock. Now, for the grand sum of $10 he had one. Years later we did acquire a real grandfather clock, which tolls its Westminster Chime every quarter hour, but that acquisition is a story for another time.
I didn’t keep Bill’s complete collection. A few happy thrift stores found their watch display cases full to the brim for a while mid-2013.
But I did keep a few, just for fun. And his $10 grandfather clock stands proudly on my desk. Which reminds me. It needs a new battery.
So as I went from room to room, preparing to spring forward for another season, I chuckled to myself wondering if there were a bunch of watches in heaven for Bill to help change.
Pauline Buck, Abbotsford (Aldergrove Rotary past president)
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