The Watch His Father Never Wore

If you asked Kal which watch most reminds him of his father, he would not point to the vintage two-tone Rolex Datejust sitting in front of us.

He would tell you about a Casio.

His father wore the inexpensive digital watch for decades. When it eventually gave out, he bought another much like it.

The more valuable watches were somewhere else.

As Kal remembers it, his father owned three expensive watches, and they spent most of their lives in a bank vault. He believes they may have originally belonged to his grandfather before passing to his father.

“If he was still here, I would ask him,” Kal said.

The gaps in the story matter differently now. They are questions he wishes he had asked when his father was still here.

What he does remember is being taken to the vault.

His father would show Kal and his siblings the watches and tell them that one day they would be passed down.

Kal and his brothers would joke about who would eventually get which one. There was another Rolex, as Kal remembers it, and a third watch made of platinum. As children, the relative desirability of each was enough to inspire the kind of arguments siblings have about possessions that do not belong to them and will not for years.

The watches waited.

So did they.

Meanwhile, Kal’s father kept wearing the Casio.

The contrast fits the man Kal describes.

His father was a physician and an immigrant to the United States. Kal grew up in Minnesota after his parents came from the Middle East in the 1980s. His father had an interest in cars and watches. Those interests moved through the family. Kal and his brothers grew up talking about cars, learning about watches, and eventually developing their own versions of the same interests.

But knowing about expensive things and indulging in them were very different matters for Kal’s father.

When I asked Kal for a term he associated with him, he answered:

“Family man.”

For his father, Kal explained, that meant sacrifice. Long hours. Providing for his wife and four children. Making choices that prioritized them, sometimes to an extent Kal found frustrating as he got older.

There were periods when the children drove nicer cars than their father.

As Kal got older, he remembers encouraging his father to enjoy more of what he had earned. From Kal’s perspective, the man who had sacrificed so much for his family deserved to occasionally choose something for himself.

Kal remembers his father knowing cars well: the specifications, the models, the details. But he did not seem particularly interested in turning that knowledge into displays of his own success.

The watches in the vault fit that pattern.

He kept them for decades.

He simply did not wear them.

Kal eventually received the two-tone Datejust on a day that, by his telling, seemed almost completely ordinary. The exchange contained little of the ceremony you might expect from an heirloom passing between generations.

His father took him to the vault.

He gave him the watch.

That was about it.

No speech. No carefully staged moment.

One day the watch was his father’s.

Then it was Kal’s.

The Datejust became Kal’s first genuinely expensive watch. Until then, he had owned watches he liked, but nothing he considered to be on the same level as a Rolex.

He remembers gratitude first.

Then something closer to obligation.

Wearing it made him feel successful, but also reminded him that he had not entirely become the person he associated with the watch yet. It represented something still ahead of him rather than marking something already accomplished.

That tension became particularly clear when Kal wore it to his medical school graduation.

He had completed medical school, but his training was not finished. He still had school loans and boards ahead of him. He had not established himself as a practicing physician.

Yet there was a two-tone Rolex on his wrist.

The watch felt aspirational.

“I’m wearing this nice watch, and now I have to live up to it,” he said, thinking back on that period.

Not because the Rolex proved anything about him. In some ways, that was exactly the problem. He had inherited something that represented a version of success he was still working toward.

The watch got there first.

In time, Kal caught up.

After completing his training, his first full-time physician position took him to New Orleans. He remembers being invited early in his tenure to a children’s fundraising gala by one of the senior physicians in his department.

The room included senior physicians and wealthy donors.

Kal put on a suit and the Datejust.

This time it felt different.

He was no longer a medical student wearing a watch that seemed to represent an achievement somewhere ahead of him. He had started his career.

At some point during those early years, the Rolex stopped feeling aspirational. It belonged on his wrist without requiring an explanation.

Then something else changed: Kal’s taste.

Over time, Kal’s taste moved toward larger watches with more wrist presence. The 36mm Datejust gradually began to feel small and dated to him. He acquired more contemporary luxury watches with larger proportions and found himself reaching for those instead.

The Rolex that once felt almost too significant to wear became a watch he rarely wore at all.

When Kal put the Datejust on for our conversation, he had not worn it in some time.

“It felt great,” he said.

He had previously sent it to Rolex for service after its long years in storage. The two-tone bracelet and fluted gold bezel still catch the light. The 36mm proportions that now feel dated to Kal are the same proportions that help place it in another era.

But when I asked which watch he would identify most strongly with his father, he still came back to the Casio.

The Casio was the watch Kal remembers seeing on his father’s wrist for decades.

The Rolex carries something else.

It waited in the vault while the Casio accumulated wear. Then it moved from one generation to another.

That difference matters more now that Kal’s father is gone.

Kal described one of the quieter changes that followed his father’s death. Early on, his father remained close in dreams and everyday thoughts. As time passed, those moments became less frequent.

What remains is a particular instinct.

Something happens and, for a second, Kal thinks he should call his father and tell him.

Then he remembers.

When Kal looks at the Datejust or wears it, he thinks of his father. He described the feeling as positive rather than sad.

“Nostalgic” was the first word he used when I asked what he associated with the watch.

Part of that nostalgia comes from the object itself. Its size, age, and style belong to another period. But much of it seems to come from where it sits in the family story.

Kal is now a father himself. His son has already heard some version of the Rolex’s story and is beginning to develop an interest in watches of his own.

Kal does not describe a formal plan for where this Datejust will eventually go, and perhaps that is beside the point.

What he does recognize is the value of creating something physical around which a story can accumulate, then allowing that story to move forward with the object.

His father did that without ceremony.

Kal’s father owned the Rolex but apparently never wore it. Kal inherited it, wore it as he built his career, and eventually grew away from it stylistically.

For neither man was it simply an everyday watch.

And yet it has endured physically within the family in a way the Casio did not.

The Casio may always be the watch Kal sees when he pictures his father’s wrist.

His father once held the Datejust. Kal waited years to receive it, then wore it while growing into the life it seemed to represent. Its story did not end when it became his.

The Casio reminds Kal how his father lived.

The Rolex gives him something to keep carrying forward.

Have a watch—and a story—to tell?

In Their Keeping shares the personal stories carried by watches. It does not need to be rare or valuable. Tell us about the watch, the story it carries, and why it matters to you.

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