SOME TRADITIONS ARE axiomatic: just as a woman should inherit her mom’s wedding ring, so should a man wear his father’s watch.
My dad, who died at the end of January, didn’t like to faff around much. He was a happily simple man with happily simple tastes, and preferred straightforwardness in all things. That’s reflected in his choice of timepiece – a white-and-gold Timex Indiglo Easy Reader, mounted on a gold stainless-steel expansion band that conforms to the wrist without constant buckling and unbuckling. Simple and tasteful, and accurate without nerding out about it – it’s easier to say “a quarter to three” than “2:47 and 38 seconds.” After more than 40 years of wearing a cheap but rugged Casio Illuminator on a plastic strap that buckles, I actually and seriously feel “grown up.”
Maybe that’s why we inherit these things, or rather, that’s what it means to inherit them. In my dad’s absence, I am now the “man of the family” (for some values of “man of the family,” anyway, since now there’s just my sister and me), and in trying to figure out exactly what that means, it occurs to me that part of it means adopting certain cultural traditions.
Hence the watch.
Might there be the same effect as inheriting his car or house? I don’t think so, as these are not as intimate as, say, what I now wear to bed every night so that I can see what time I wake up. Or to synagogue board meetings. Or to conduct services. Or to the grocery store. Or even to simply look at and think about the man who wore it before I did, and wonder what he thought about when he looked at it.
Thanks, Dad. It’s good to feel like the man who’s your son.