I’ve always liked nice watches.
Most of them, however, have been cheap rubber Casios or whatever the hell I could find because I worked in law enforcement for years. I broke at least four watches during various fights in my career. In my younger, salad days of course.
Today, being an elder gentleman and more irascible, in my seventh decade, I won’t fight you. I’ll just shoot you. Which is why I can finally wear my Rolex Submariner.
It’s a beautiful watch and it has an incredible back story. It goes like this.
My father passed away in 2009 at the age of 88. He was a member of The Greatest Generation, flew B-17s for the Mighty Eighth, and seldom spoke of his service. I cornered him for a couple of days a few years before he died and got him to talk a bit about his family. Those conversations are on cassette. Yes. Cassette. Tape.
About two years before he died, as we were gathering documents and I was assembling his wishes, archiving them for my oldest brother, the executor of Dad’s estate, he quite mysteriously told me that I’d one day find a chest.
He didn’t tell me where it was. But he said I’d find a number of things there. One of them would be a watch he’d acquired when he was in Hong Kong but, he said, it was likely a knock-off because it hadn’t been all that expensive at the time in the 1960s.
He said it looked like a Rolex, so he’d bought it. He said he wanted me to have it when I found it.
The strange thing was, about two months prior, he said he wanted to get a very specific watch that he’d found at the WalMart on Watt Avenue. I took him there and purchased it for him. He was really quite pleased. To have Dad happy was, well, magical. The watch would illuminate when a button was pushed. Remember that.
My father passed away at 3:30 AM on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009. It was now my oldest brother’s job to tend to the estate.
The strange thing is, with a few exceptions, neither of my brothers were interested in very many of Dad’s things. My oldest brother’s wife insisted on taking a trunk from the living room and the family heirloom book, plus a knick-knack I wanted from Grandma’s house. But I stood back and let whoever wanted to take what they took when they wished. I was the youngest brother. I felt I just had to take one for the team.
There were tons of photo books. Uninterested. I took them. There were tons of Dad’s books. Uninterested. I took them. There were tons of family slides and photographs. Uninterested. I took them. Then I found something.
I found the chest. It was in Dad’s shop, up high, in the rafters. It was heavy. I managed to heft it down and opened it. Inside I found maps of California from World War II marked CLASSIFIED, which I kept. Dad was a USAAC pilot and they were likely maps he’d used in PriFly. I’m not giving those maps to anyone. They are mine.
I found his USAF dress hat as a Colonel, with the beautifully-embroidered clouds and lightning on the brim. I also found one of his piss cutters still in its original plastic bag (one of the most stupid caps in the history of history) with a price tag affixed. $2.75.
I found his custom desk sign when he was a Captain.
And I also found a green box — not so impressive — which contained an absolutely gorgeous watch in blue, silver and gold, called a Rolex Submariner. You know. The fake watch he bought in Hong Kong.
A few months after the funeral, I wondered. Was it fake or was it real? I took the watch to a couple of local jewelers, both of whom said they could neither confirm nor deny its validity. They both said I needed to take it to a person on Fulton Avenue who could examine the watch.
To simply open up the back of the watch — much less confirm any kind of provenance — was a $200 charge.
The appraisal was another $250.
But wait.
That Rolex Submariner was appraised at $15,000+.
Gulp. It was real.
And Dad gave it to me. No one else. It’s a beautiful watch. Hell, it’s gorgeous.
But, according to Dad, it didn’t light up at night. And if you didn’t wear it, it would die. It just didn’t interest him. He sort of liked the colors but that was it.
He’s right. It doesn’t light up at night. Unless you hold it under a lamp and cause the face to illuminate for a while. It dies if you don’t wear it and keep it running by the movement of your wrist.
It will tell you the numerical date, but you have to adjust it for Leap Years.
It’s hella analog in a digital world.
But it was my Dad’s, it’s real, and I’ll treasure it always.
BZ
My father, United States Air Force full bird Colonel Richard Lee Alley, passed away ten years ago, on this day. February 11th, 2009.
He was 88 years old. He missed his 89th birthday by less than two months.
I cannot, still, tell you how terribly I miss him.
The generation that secured promise and freedom and liberty for not only the United States, but for the entire world at large.
Ten years. I can remember it like yesterday. It seems like it was yesterday. And there isn’t a day that I don’t think about Dad.
So many questions. So many questions I would loved to have asked him. But I was wrapped up in my life and didn’t realize until a year or so later how he may have played a very serious role in any number of USAF adventures on many levels.
That first night of his passing, the 11th, I had a dream. I awakened with it in my head. Carole King was singing “
