Why I Might Give Away a Watch I’ve Grown to Appreciate

Worn & Considered / 004

I like what this watch has become. I still might give it away.

I’d been thinking about moving on from it for roughly a year. I wasn’t wearing it consistently anymore. But there wasn’t much urgency to make a decision. Unlike more expensive watches I’ve moved on from, my bronze Glycine Combat Sub wasn’t tying up substantial money that could go toward something I’d appreciate more deeply.

It could simply sit there.

And increasingly, it did.

I bought the Glycine roughly four years ago as an experiment.

At the time, my collection was essentially stainless steel, and I had become interested in bronze. I had looked at the Panerai Submersible Bronzo, Tudor Black Bay Bronze, and Oris Big Crown Bronze Pointer Date. There was something about the warmth of the material that was missing from my collection, but what interested me most was the idea that bronze wouldn’t stay the way it looked when I bought it.

I wanted to experience the patina.

I just didn’t know whether I actually wanted to live with it.

Would it leave marks on my skin or dress shirts? Would I become so preoccupied with developing the right patina that the watch demanded wrist time I’d rather give to something else?

Spending thousands of dollars seemed like an expensive way to answer those questions.

The Glycine offered another way.

I found one through r/WatchExchange. The purchase was somewhat impulsive and fairly ordinary as watch purchases go. It offered a bronze case, sapphire crystal, Swiss movement, and satisfying bezel action at a price that didn’t require a conversation about family finances.

That appealed to the way I’ve generally collected watches. I enjoy finding value, whether that’s buying used, finding something discounted, shopping grey market, or buying directly from another collector.

The Glycine arrived on a bright green leather strap that didn’t appeal to me. But I already owned a deep brown Horween leather NATO, and changing the strap transformed it.

Suddenly, I could see what I’d been looking for.

The Glycine was never supposed to be the destination. It was supposed to answer a question:

Do I like owning a bronze watch enough to eventually buy a more expensive one?

I didn’t expect to still own the experiment four years later.

Somewhere along the way, it became my fall watch.

It fit the scene naturally.

Hikes through Golden Gate Canyon with the aspens igniting the mountainside. Crisp Denver air in October. Apple orchards and pumpkin patches. Smart-casual date nights reconnecting with my wife after a long week.

On my wrist, the shifting bronze, brushed espresso-colored bezel, and worn deep brown Horween leather brought their own warmth. The green dial could appear almost black in one light and unmistakably green in another.

The watch could move comfortably through all of it.

More personally, it paired with just about every variation of Eagles green I owned.

My fall watch became my Sunday watch for roughly eighteen weeks a year.

Denver is a transplant city, and some bars become adopted homes for teams thousands of miles away. For me, that was Larimer Beer Hall.

Sunday afternoons meant Eagles fans and Philadelphia transplants. Hot wings with friends and high-fives with familiar strangers.

And, when things went well, “Fly Eagles Fly.”

E-A-G-L-E-S.

On November 5, 2023, the Eagles played the Dallas Cowboys. If you’re an Eagles fan, that sentence probably provides enough context.

It was messy and hard-fought. Philadelphia was ahead late, but Dallas kept threatening. The game wasn’t settled until the final seconds. The Eagles won 28-23.

The bar was packed. The crowd was buzzing. By the end, it was electric.

The Glycine was on my wrist.

At the time, there wasn’t anything particularly significant about that.

It was Sunday.

The Eagles were playing.

I wore my Sunday watch.

Two weeks later, I would be on my way to Jacksonville.

That Cowboys game became my last Eagles game in Denver. My last one at Larimer Beer Hall. My last one there with those friends and familiar strangers.

I didn’t put the Glycine on that morning because I was commemorating something.

At the time, it was just another Sunday. It only became significant after we left Denver.

Maybe that’s how a lot of objects accumulate meaning.

We deliberately attach some of them to weddings, births, promotions, or other moments we know we’ll want to remember. Others are simply there when ordinary life quietly becomes history.

The Glycine wasn’t precious. It wasn’t delicate. It wasn’t necessarily the watch I loved most.

But it fit.

I began treating it almost like a favorite sweater. When the weather changed, it came back out. When the season passed, it went away again.

It was perfectly capable of being a daily watch. I had simply typecast it.

And while all of that was happening, the watch was changing.

The bronze darkened. Scratches accumulated. Pockets of green oxidation appeared. The leather softened and began to fray. It lost the brightness it had when I bought it.

That was, of course, the point.

Bronze makes use unusually visible.

But the Glycine wasn’t recording one important event. It was accumulating evidence of ordinary life. Football Sundays. Hikes. Apple orchards. Date nights. Fall arriving and leaving.

When I bought it, our life had settled into something recognizable. We had been in our jobs for a while. We knew our neighborhood. We had our favorite places, our friends, and our routines.

We had our normal.

The watch changed quietly inside that normal.

Eventually, the normal changed too.

We moved to Jacksonville. Fall became something different. Winter certainly became something different. The places and rituals this watch had naturally belonged to were no longer immediately part of my life.

The watch hadn’t stopped fitting my wrist.

I just didn’t seem to have as many reasons to reach for it anymore.

I don’t know if that’s why I started thinking about giving it away. I’m not sure there was ever a moment when I decided I was finished with it.

Held in Regard gave me a reason to put it in front of a camera.

There I was in my kitchen with my phone, a notebook and pencil arranged beside the watch. I had a new macro lens I wanted to try. The idea was simple: take a few photographs I could use between longer pieces to support a developing Instagram account.

I figured I’d spend thirty or forty-five minutes.

I moved the watch around, changed the light, took another photograph, then looked back at the watch.

Not because anything was wrong. Not because I couldn’t get the photograph right.

I simply wanted more.

Through the screen, I found myself looking almost lovingly at an object sitting immediately in front of me.

Thirty minutes became forty-five. Then an hour. By the time I stopped, nearly ninety minutes had passed.

I noticed the brush marks on the bezel. I watched the green dial disappear almost into black before revealing itself again as the light changed.

I noticed how the Horween leather had softened. The slight fraying at its edges somehow looked comfortable and inviting rather than damaged.

And then there were the green spots appearing in the bronze.

I had always assumed oxidation like that would annoy me. Maybe I’d eventually want to clean it away and start the process over.

Instead, I liked it.

The green played against the dial. The unevenness made the watch more interesting to photograph. Evidence of age that I might once have considered an imperfection had become one of the details keeping me behind the camera.

Nothing about the watch had suddenly changed.

My attention had.

And paying attention changed how I saw the Glycine.

But I’m not sure it changed how attached I am to it.

I appreciate this watch. I recommend it. I’ve enjoyed watching it change. Four years later, it has done what I bought it to do and then some.

Do I love it the way I love some of my other watches?

Probably not.

From the beginning, I had one foot out the door. It was an experiment before something else. I didn’t buy it to commemorate anything. It wasn’t a gift. It wasn’t something I’d pursued for years.

And yet the “something else” never came.

I never replaced it with the Panerai, Tudor, or Oris.

I simply kept wearing the Glycine.

Strangely, it may also be the watch I own that friends and strangers notice most often. There’s something different enough about the combination of bronze, green, and leather to catch someone’s eye without seeming to ask for the attention.

Friends who know I’m interested in watches have asked about it. They’re often surprised when I tell them what it cost. Something they find handsome, interesting, and unusual turns out to be considerably more accessible than they expected.

Their reactions didn’t necessarily make me appreciate the Glycine more. They did make it easier to imagine someone else appreciating it. And that distinction has stayed with me.

I like the watch, and I’d recommend it without hesitation. I’m just not sure that means I need to keep owning it.

Thinking about that brought me somewhere unexpected: my childhood toy box.

Every so often, my mom would make us go through it. New toys had arrived, and old ones needed to be discarded or donated.

A toy I hadn’t touched for months would end up back in my hands. I’d remember playing with it. Maybe I’d spend a few minutes with it again. Something that hadn’t mattered to me ten minutes earlier suddenly became harder to give away.

Attention could revive affection. Sometimes that meant I kept the toy. Sometimes it didn’t.

Looking back, maybe those moments were an early lesson in the difference between saying, “I don’t want this anymore,” and saying, “I understand what this has been to me, and I’m ready for someone else to have it.”

The Glycine has me thinking about that distinction again.

If I’m not going to wear it, I like the idea of finding someone who will. Letting it go doesn’t have to diminish the history it already has.

I have someone in mind for the Glycine. I don’t remember exactly where we were when he first commented on it, or his exact words. I remember that he noticed it. The green dial caught his attention, and his interest felt genuine. It fits his style. I think he’d wear and appreciate it.

The Glycine is sitting in front of me again.

The strap is showing its age in the best possible way. The bronze has lost almost all of the brightness it had four years ago. Small patches of green have worked their way into the surface, including the oxidation I once assumed I’d want to remove.

I don’t anymore.

This isn’t the inexpensive bronze experiment I bought four years ago.

But I’m still not certain I’m going to keep it.

I don’t know whether I’d miss it. I don’t know whether giving it away would finally send me toward the Panerai, Tudor, or Oris I originally imagined.

Maybe I’d regret the whole thing and buy another Glycine.

What I do know is that I don’t want to move it along simply for the sake of moving it along.

If it leaves, I’d like it to go to someone who will enjoy it. Someone who will wear it.

Maybe attention doesn’t require possession.