Finding My Horological Roots: Mother’s Day Recollections 

I love to hear how different folks got into watches, regardless of what their level of interests are, how long they’ve had the bug (perhaps the only time when that phrase is desirable), or how seemingly mundane their stories may be. For every narrative about how an heirloom piece handed down solely through the male lineage of a family—looking at you, people from the Patek ads—there are a multitude of anecdotes of shades far more interesting to me. Likely, my appreciation for such non-traditional, and non-patriarchal stories owes to two things about me: first, I’m fairly iconoclastic in my tastes, and second, my love of watches originated with my mother. 

This isn’t to say that my father has zero interest in watches. Quite to the contrary, he has grown increasingly fond of watches over the past several years. My dad is a highly sagacious and practical guy, though, to the point that I recall him wearing 2-3 Timex Ironmans for my entire childhood. That wasn’t a rotation either, but a sequence whereby each time one failed, it was replaced with a similar model; they worked for what he needed, and that was more than enough.

My mother, on the other hand, always had multiple watches when I was growing up, and, importantly to the eyes of a kid, they were shiny. As I write this, I recognize that her watches were perhaps some of the first items I recall really seeing—not literally but in terms of observing the intricacies of a thing, not just the whole. To appreciate this, you have to know that my mother is the child of an artist (my grandmother) and the most nattily-dressed NYC ad-man I ever met (my grandfather). She’s got an affinity for nice things, and she generously passed that down to me.  

I recall a trip to a department store when I was maybe 9 or 10, during which my mom spent hours looking at different watches. While some kids may rather have pulled their newly-grown teeth out than spend a day shopping for watches with their mother, I loved it. It was through these experiences that I gained an early appreciation for what to look for in a watch—what size one prefers on their wrist, what tone of metal for the case, the differences between the way different bracelets wear, and so much more. That trip, from what I recall, resulted in purchase of a beautiful gold Raymond Weil Toccata that she still wears, and which still looks somehow mint. 

Nowhere, perhaps, was her taste in watches better evinced than through the gift she purchased herself upon graduating from law school. At a time prior to when certain parts of the watch industry labelled quartz movements as inferior to their manual counterparts, my mother bought herself a quartz Cartier Tank Vermeil as a way of saying, “Holy crap, I did that!” Her Raymond Weil was more regularly worn during my life, and more readily visible in its golden resplendence, but the Cartier is her. It is the first watch that I recall ever seeing and making a distinct memory of and is the watch that, when I think of how I got into this mad and beautiful hobby, springs forth as a point of origin. 

There is no clean conclusion to this story because—fortunately—I still get to share this joy with my mother. Recently, she asked me during one of our phone chats if I’d heard of Borealis Watches, that she thinks they make beautiful timepieces. Well, as a lover of microbrand watches, and the former owner of a Borealis Portus Cale, I could barely say “YES!” quickly enough. And every now and then, I’ll get a text from her with a photo of a watch, with a brief note of “Nice, no?” Sometimes, they are nice, sometimes, they aren’t to my taste, but that isn’t really what’s important to me. What matters is that I still get to talk about watches with the person who ignited my own passion for the devices, and to her, I say, Happy Mother’s Day.