Aside from sharing the cute bomber jacket when we were babies, another thing that we passed on as siblings was my mother’s Tugaris watch. It was a Swiss-made wind-up watch that my mother first wore when she was a college student in the 1960s.
I can’t remember the exact details but my mother probably gave it first to my brother when he was in sixth grade or when he entered high school. It was a rite of passage, a gesture of passing on adult responsibility. For my mother, the watch symbolized one’s capacity to keep time, to be on time. Unfortunately, my brother, our resident poet and philosopher, never learned to be punctual. To this day, he remains notorious for always being late.
Once, I tried to borrow my brother’s watch and wore it to school. But it looked too fancy compared to the Mickey Mouse watches of my classmates. When the original silver strap broke, my mother had it replaced with a black leather one, which made the Tugaris look more youthful and masculine.
My brother passed on the Tugaris to me when I entered high school. But the late ‘70s and the early ‘80s saw the rise of the digital age, when we became more familiar with blinking pixels. Our generation marked adolescence by switching from Game and Watch to Atari or the analog Mickey Mouse watch to the digital Casio (Those who found the shift disorienting could opt for the “digi-ana” watches, which became fashionable for a while.).
The wealthier kids in school brandished their calculator watches. I began to feel awkward wearing my mom’s vintage watch. Thus, when cheap digital watches proliferated in the streets, we asked our parents to buy one for each of us. That’s how I was able to replace my Swiss watch with a blinking digital watch whose back cover would soon rust, leaving a brown stain on my wrist.
My siblings and I had more of these plastic and rust-prone metal digital watches before we all reverted to the old Tugaris, taking turns to wear it when it was really my younger brother’s time to own it.
I stopped wearing watches in college. As art students, we loved to brag that we were not slaves of time. The clenched fist and naked wrist is a symbol of our rebellion. We relished our “time-less existence” yet somehow we were seldom late. We still actually relied on clocks or someone with a watch to tell us the time.
Ironically, when I became a teacher, I became a stickler for punctuality. When I would be late for 15 minutes, I myself would be marked absent by the checker and thus would get no pay. I did not want to be caught with no class, so I forced my students to come on time. Teaching, despite our claims to vocation, has always been a day job. I had a family to feed so I could not afford to lose a day’s salary due to my tardiness.
So I had to buy watches again. I love Swiss watches but the only one I could afford was a Swatch. I had two changes of a limited-edition Art Swatch designed by famous artists. I had a colorful one designed by an abstract artist whose name evades me now. The other is a black and white Swatch designed by Yoko Ono.
After my two Swatches died, I never bought anything as expensive. I settled for cheap made-in-China watches. The hour hand watches tend to lose accuracy after a while, so I prefer the digital ones. But electronic watches in general, whether expensive or not, don’t really last long.
I wonder why, in spite of our claims to technological advancement, we don’t make watches that operate without batteries anymore. I miss our old Tugaris. It never really broke down, I guess. But I could no longer find it. It must be there somewhere in my mother’s cabinets or chests, waiting to be rediscovered like an artifact of a bygone age by our grandchildren.
For that was how things were made back then: They were made to last, to outlive the user. I never really appreciated the value of the Tugaris when we wore it as kids. Today, I realize that many people are willing to buy a vintage Swiss watch on e-bay. It was worth something after all. Like other vintage Swiss brands, it was a watch that was, well, timeless.