What Time Is It?

My dad retired from Armco Steel Corporation in 1977. He worked there for twenty-eight consecutive years. He actually worked there a bit longer, but a steel strike interrupted his tenure and he drove a cab for a while. All my life, he wore a hard hat and worked the graveyard shift (midnight until eight in morning) in the mill on the Houston Ship Channel.

He dressed for work each night around ten, just as we were preparing for bed. He donned his khaki pants and shirt, laced up his steel-toed work boots, and grabbed his white hard hat, which marked him as a foreman. Then he’d give me a hug and tell me goodnight. He smelled like Old Spice.

Dad came home each morning around nine, which meant that my sister and I were already at school. He ate a meal and then went to bed. When we got home, he was always asleep. Around six my mom would send us to wake him up and call him to join us for supper. It seemed a strange circadian rhythm that had one sleeping in the day, working at night, and eating spaghetti and meatballs for breakfast.

Imported Japanese steel brought a change to the industry and Dad took early retirement in 1977, at age 58, only a year older than I am now. He and Mom soon sold their home and moved to the suburbs of Houston. He bought a bicycle shop in Humble, Texas and ran that business for several years, giving away more merchandise than he sold and repairing too many kid's bikes for free.

Somewhere along the way, I don't recall when, he gave me his retirement watch. It is a silver Bouleva Accutron, once billed as the most accurate watch in the world. It has an Armco logo on the face and an inscription on the back: “To Joseph R. Creech, 28 years, 1950-1977, Armco Steel Corp., “ and the signature of William Verity, CEO.

Despite its claim, this watch never functioned perfectly. I used to wear it, but out of frustration and failed repair attempts, eventually set it aside. For some reason, earlier this year, I spontaneously took it out of the jewelry box and turned it over to a local jeweler for repair. I have been wearing it since July, and it is once more keeping time. It is analogue. It tells me how long until and how long since, not just the precise moment. I like that.

I don’t know what prompted me to leave my digital Casio Fishing Watch, with all its cool features, in my top drawer and wear the silver Accutron. I didn’t realize until some weeks after I’d been wearing it that my dad first put it on when he was my age, leaving work he’d done for twenty-eight years to relocate and take on a new task.

It was the watch that got me thinking about time and its passing. My dad lived another 18 years after he retired, even with his smoking and emphysema. The second hand on the Accutron swept across the face nine and a half million times. Fifteen years ago next month, he died.

I suspect it is our consciousness of mortality that makes us wear watches and glance at them throughout the day. We are, as Martin Heidegger reminded us, Beings-Unto-Death – not the only creatures who die, but the only ones who live with an awareness of life’s brevity. This is ultimately what we have to make sense of in order to live with meaning. The watch is a reminder of a gift my dad gave me – not a watch, but a life of hard work supporting his family, a life of character and love. It has also reminds me of the gift my Heavenly Father has promised, eternal life through Jesus Christ my Lord, a transcending of this mortal, time-limited existence, the hope of which allows me to live with meaning now.