Parallels

What remains after the performance

There was a time when I would not have appreciated this watch.

I might have admired its precision. I could have repeated the specifications, explained Spring Drive to anyone patient enough to listen and held the case beneath the light to watch its polished surfaces come alive, but I would not have understood why a man would choose it.

It was too quiet for me then.

The younger man wants his watch to announce something before he has earned the confidence to say it himself. He wants evidence of arrival: a recognizable shape, a celebrated name, some spark of luxurious recognition from across the room. He does not merely want a good watch. He wants the watch to testify on his behalf.

The Grand Seiko SBGA283 refuses the assignment.

Its case is stainless steel and sensibly proportioned. Its polished planes are precise without becoming severe, softened by curves that make the watch feel composed rather than calculated. Its dial exists somewhere between silver and champagne, taking all available light and doing with it as it pleases. This is not the passive shimmer of an object waiting to be admired. The dial seems to possess its own judgment. Give it the cold fluorescent light of an office and it becomes silver, restrained and nearly austere. Carry it into the warmth of late afternoon and the champagne rises through it. Neither color is a disguise. Both were there from the beginning.

I suppose the same could be said of a man.

For years, I measured success by the things I collected. The job titles and the clothes. The right car and the right watch. Enough money to place the proper objects around me until their combined testimony became convincing. I mistook acquisition for construction and envy for ambition. I looked at what other men possessed and assembled my desires from the evidence of more, more, more.

Somewhere beneath all that coveting, however, was a man I already knew.

Not clearly and certainly not well enough to trust. I recognized him in occasional moments when the performance became too exhausting to maintain. He was quieter than the person I presented to the world. Less interested in being seen, more certain of what he valued and less willing to explain why. I thought he was the man I might become after some final achievement. In truth, he was the man I had buried beneath everything I believed achievement was supposed to look like.

Time did not build him. It stripped away what concealed him.

Failure helped. Success did too, though it took longer. Failure removes certain illusions by force. Success permits you to discover that getting what you wanted does not necessarily justify wanting it. Between them, they relieved me of ambitions that belonged to other people, appetites I had mistaken for personality and possessions acquired to settle arguments no one else knew we were having.

What remained was not the man I had imagined.

He was more familiar than that.

Perhaps that is why the SBGA283 feels stately to me now. Not regal or grand in the ceremonial sense. Rather, stately in the way of a man who no longer fills every silence with an explanation because he knows he doesn't have to.

Even the watch's history follows this pattern. It began as the SBGA083, its dial divided between two identities: SEIKO at twelve, Grand Seiko at six. Then, in 2017, Grand Seiko stepped out from beneath the umbrella. "Seiko" disappeared. "Grand Seiko" moved to the top of the dial. The reference became SBGA283.

Mechanically, almost nothing had changed. The case remained. The champagne dial remained. Inside, the same Spring Drive caliber continued moving its seconds hand in one uninterrupted sweep.

Grand Seiko had not become something else. It had removed the name it no longer needed and stood on its own. There was no reinvention, only recognition.

I understand that better now than I would have then.

At a certain age, a man begins to separate the things he truly likes from the things he once needed other people to see him liking. The distinction is rarely flattering. You remember the clothes that wore you, the opinions delivered with more conviction than experience and the objects bought as evidence for a version of yourself that did not yet exist.

The embarrassment is useful. It's proof that some excavation has taken place.

The SBGA283 can accompany a suit without becoming part of the costume. It can sit beneath the cuff of a white shirt during whatever serious business the day demands, then remain on the wrist when the shirt is exchanged for an old T-shirt and jeans. It does not transform between those settings. The man does not transform either. Only the light changes.

And the watch does with it as it pleases.

I sold this watch to John, whom I have known for more than forty years. We were eleven when we won a basketball championship together, and thirteen when we were briefly certain that a t-shirt line we designed, called "Hey Bob," would make us rich. Then we left for different colleges and chased different lives that kept turning out to be the same life. Both of us grinding. Both hungry. Both consuming everything within reach in pursuit of the kind of success only young men can conjure, the kind of life that looks enviable from a distance because the consequences have been cropped out of the photograph. He is an entrepreneur too, which means he has enough behind him now to be suspicious of it and enough failure to know it is rarely fatal. I know his family top to bottom. He knows mine. Parallel men. Not the same man, but two who kept arriving at the same places.

He needed time too. Not to become another man, but to wear out the wrong versions of himself, until the one underneath stopped looking to him like a disappointment.

I did not sell him the watch as a reward for becoming the man he recognized. It is not a medal, and I am not the one who hands them out. The joy was quieter than that. The watch spoke to him, and it said the same thing it says to me, in the same low register. I conferred nothing. I watched a man and an object recognize each other, the way the watch had once recognized me. Not aspiration, exactly, but correspondence. The watch did not advertise a better future or offer to carry either of us across the distance toward it. It simply resembled what remained after enough of the bullshit had fallen away.

The seconds hand moves continuously across the dial, untroubled by the divisions beneath it. That is the appeal of Spring Drive, though "appeal" feels inadequate for what happens here. The movement does not perform. It proceeds, smooth and confident, without so much as a hitch.

There is something enviable in that.

The SBGA283 is not a watch for the man who has conquered his past. Such men exist mainly in autobiographies written by liars. It is a watch for someone who has made peace with the evidence: the mistakes that cannot be revised, the ambitions that belonged to someone else and the earlier selves who did the best they could with limited information.

He does not forgive all of them. But he has stopped pretending they were strangers.

For a long time, I believed the man I wanted to become was waiting somewhere ahead of me. I kept acquiring things I thought might bring him closer, or persuade others that he had already arrived.

I was looking in the wrong direction.

He had been there the whole time, standing beneath the names and expectations I had piled onto him. He did not need to be built. He needed to be uncovered and left to stand on his own two feet. The watch had done exactly that, and shed a name to do it.

This watch would have been wasted on me when I was younger. Not because I had yet to become the man who could wear it, but because I had not yet cleared away everything that kept me from seeing he was already there.