My father's watch

It's twelve years this month since my father died. I was at college in Minneapolis, and my mother called in the middle of an afternoon, which she never did, and I knew before she said anything. I don't write about him often. I'm not sure I know how. But I want to write about his watch, because I'm wearing it.

He was an engineer on the ore boats, the long lake freighters that carry taconite from the docks at Duluth and Two Harbors down the lakes to the steel mills. He worked in the engine room, below the waterline, in a heat and a noise I only saw once, on a tour when I was nine, and have never forgotten. On the boats the day is cut into watches: four hours on and eight off, around the clock, for weeks at a time. He stood the same watch for years. When he was home, he still woke at the hour it started, and went downstairs, and made coffee nobody else was up to drink.

The watch itself is nothing special to look at. Plain steel, a black face, a crystal with a scratch across the six. It winds by hand. He bought it in his first season on the boats, at nineteen, from a jeweler on Superior Street, and wore it every day afterward, on watch and off. Every morning he was home, he wound it at the kitchen table before his coffee, twenty turns, never more. It lost about a minute a week, and on Sundays he set it right by the radio. He used to say an engineer who couldn't keep his own watch running had no business near an engine.

After he died, my mother gave it to me. It was far too big for my wrist, and for years it sat in a drawer, wrapped in a handkerchief of his, because I couldn't decide whether wearing it would be the right thing or the wrong one. Two years ago I took it to a watchmaker downtown here, an old man with a loupe on a string, and he cleaned it and put it on a smaller band and told me it was a good honest movement and would outlast me. So I wear it now, most days.

I wind it every morning at my own kitchen table. Twenty turns. It still loses about a minute a week. On Sundays I set it right by my phone, which he would have found very funny.

There are boats here too, of course. Container ships in Elliott Bay, enormous and patient. He taught me to read the load line on a hull, to tell how heavy a boat is riding, and I still check every one I pass, out of a habit I didn't know I'd kept until somebody asked me what I was looking at. They aren't his boats. But I look.

It's Sunday, so I set it tonight. It had lost fifty seconds this week, near enough. I put the minute back, and it's on my wrist while I write this, ticking slightly too slow, the way it always has.