Rant #3,070: No Time

It is Thursday, February 9, and it is just like any other Thursday for me.

I woke up, took a shower, got dressed, brought in the garbage pail, retrieved the newspaper, and sat down and ate breakfast and started to read the newspaper.

I soon have to wake up my son for work, and while he gets ready for his day, I will finish up what I do in the early morning and prepare to take him to work.

After I drive him to work, I go straight to the supermarket, where I buy my groceries for the week. My wife, who is at work herself, gave me the list of what we need and I try to follow it to the letter.

I buy all the groceries we need, and I take them home, put them where they belong, check to see what work has come in for me, and somehow squeeze lunch into this busy day.

After lunch and hopefully after I finish my work, I drive out to pick up my son from work, and then I take him to do his own shopping.

Then we go home, and I look over the mail, for both my family and my mother, who simply cannot do this anymore, and while I do this, my son puts away what he has bought, and I then do any residual work that I did not finish earlier. My wife has arrived home from her work, and she is starting to prepare dinner for the three of us.

We eat dinner, and after having checked up periodically through the day with my mother to see how she is doing, I meet with her again after I eat, and usually spend about 20 minutes to a half hour with her.

After I leave her, I watch a little TV with my wife, and then my son, and then I usually fall asleep watching TV with my son, and I somehow make it to the bed, and I am done for the day.

And then I start it all up again on Friday.

But the last few days have been a bit different for me—not a major difference, but something a wee bit different nonetheless--because for the first time in decades, I have done all of these things without wearing a wristwatch on my left wrist.

This does not seem like a monumental change, but for me, it is.

I have worn a watch since I was about five or six years old. I think I originally did it because I thought it made me feel more mature, older than I was … and you know how kids always want to feel older than they really are.

But then it simply became a necessity.

When I was roaming the grounds of my neighborhood in the sprawling community of Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens,NewYork, you could still go from one end of the community to another without your mother knowing exactly where you were.

But if she was preparing supper for the family—she, my sister and I, and my father would eat later when he came home from work—I had better be where I was supposed to be—at home—at that time, or I would hear about it, and hear about it but good.

And as I grew older, I simply needed to see what time it was as part of my regular progression of the day.

And I have worn a watch on my left wrist for probably nearly 60 years now, and me not being a jewelry person, it is the only such thing I ever wore on my person.

I have had many watches over the years—fun and functional and both at the same time—but when they broke or did not run anymore, I seemed to always have a replacement ready to go.

But in the current time, my watch simply stopped working, and after seeing that it was one of those watches where it would be difficult to get the battery out to change it—if that was the actual problem—I decided to ditch it and get a new watch.

The watch I had I had purchased right at the beginning of the pandemic. Back three years ago, I went to the local Walmart when my then-current watch had also died, and was really lucky.

If you remember,Walmart was one of the few stores open during those early days, and myself and maybe 20 other people—total, including workers--were in the store.

I went through watch after watch—looking for one that had a backlight and also was waterproof—and after going through about 100 watches, I found one—only one—that fit that criteria, and that was the one that I had on my wrist when it died last week.

So I went back to Walmart, thinking I would be so lucky this time, but lo and behold, their watch section had diminished by about half from three years ago, and nothing fit my needs.

I went to Target, and the once bustling watch department was no more. They had few men’ watches scattered about, but they were cheap and did not meet my needs, so I still had no watch.

(I have heard that wristwatches have become almost passé because everyone has a cellphone, and can look up the time using that device, or if people have a watch, it is a smart watch, hooked up to the Internet and able to do so many other things than tell time, but guess I am old fashioned, and all I want is a traditional wristwatch.)

I decided to order a watch online, and I found the perfect one on Amazon, under the male watches banner, one that fit all my parameters.

I ordered it, received it in the mail a day and a half later, but to my astonishment, it was a male watch all right—one for a little boy. It was so small that I could barely see its face, and I could barely get it on my wrist.

So, still no watch.

Totally frustrated, I went to the Kohl’s site, found another watch that I felt was way overpriced but met my needs, and I ordered it—but I received a message back telling me that while my order would be filled, that I should expect delays, and that the watch would come to me not in a week or so, but most probably by the end of the month.

So here I am, without a watch for some time now, and the white spot on my wrist—where all the watches covered up my skin from the sun for decades—is beginning to get a little darker without a watch over it.

Sure, this is not a big problem, but I keep on looking at my now bare wrist for the time, and all I see is skin.

What time is it?