Changing times

I bought a watch yesterday, at the bookstore in Terminal 2 at the Phoenix airport. The last one I bought was the Pretty Watch, in the spring of 1989 in Birmingham. The Useful Watch, currently languishing awaiting a new battery, dates back to 1984; before that was the ultra-cheap digital one the year before, and before that the dainty mechanical one, an eleventh birthday present, that I wore through seven years of secondary school and into University, until it got too hard to find anyone to do its yearly servicing. This one is a fairly innocuous quartz analog model, Japanese movement, Chinese band and case, with a nice clear dial and a second hand giving it a couple of advantages over the pretty one. It's odd how personal a watch is, even a fifteen-dollar one; I kept being startled every time I looked at my wrist and saw this big, shiny, unfamiliar thing. (It isn't all that big; the dial is about nickel-sized, but I have small wrists.) I'll still replace the battery in the Useful Watch, and probably wear it most of the time, but now I'll have a choice for workdays.