A Lesson for the Inner Child

Well, I did it; I bought a Rolex. I did it after coveting one, toying with the idea, for decades. It’s just a watch albeit a very expensive one, an unneeded acquisition especially just a few weeks after buying a vastly more practical Apple watch.
            But it’s not just a watch.
I admit fully that I feel guilty, indulgent, stupid, silly, immature, and quite happy. The quite happy bit is growing and the scales are tipping in its favor.
The rationalizing part is that I sold my Blancpain for $4300, which covers just over half of the Rolex’s $8300, and if the shop that sold it to me is honest about things – and my internet confirm this – they gave me the old price and it’s selling for a couple of thousand more in the secondary market they’re in such demand. In that respect, it was an okay investment thus alleviating a small part of the guilt trip.
Still, I “need” it like a hole in the head, though maybe not quite like a hole in the head. I mean that’s an odd expression, need it like a hole in the head because surely a watch of any sort has more utility than a hole in the head, but it’s not about need is it? There’s more to the Rolex than meets the eye. It means something to me if I only understood what.
I first came across Rolex as a watch around the time I went off to Denmark for a rough exchange program on a very isolated mink farm, but that’s another story. I needed a watch (ha!) and Mom took me to a jeweler in Mt. Kisco, next door to Smilkstein’s Department Store where we’d buy Hushpuppies and, once, leather Converse sneakers I loved until lost to a rising tide off a beach in Cape Cod. I’m sure Mom had a Timex in mind and if not Mom then most assuredly Dad. As she turned the circular display of Timex’s I walked around to where the higher-end watches were; Omegas, Bulovas, and a brand I never heard of called Rolex. One ,the Explorer, boasted of having gone up Everest with Edmund Hillary. An accompanying sheet from a National Geographic ad boasted of its quality, endurance, and promised adventure to a potential owner. The imagination of a fifteen-year arm-chair explorer was engaged.
            Alas, that watch was around $250 (how do I remember such detail?) and the Ader budget stopped at around $20, putting even a Timex that looked like a diver’s watch – glow-in-the-dark numbers and rubber band – also out of our price range. 
I always noticed Rolexes after than – how could you not, what with teasing advertisements in magazines I read like The Economist, National Geographic, in duty-free shops and the window of Tourneau, which was just down the block from where I worked with BondWeek. And, oh my, they were there on the wrists of people I would meet on Wall Street, on the arms of my father’s dermatologist friends before that, and on people I held in awe. I will mention first names of some; Gus, Neal, Mark, Luis, Ian, Peter, Anthony, Kenny, Ron, Howard, Bob, Cappy, and the list goes on. Add a dose of contempt to that as well.
I can think of scores, hundreds, of people I met who have a Rolex without an iota of guilt; most because they worked for it, a few who got theirs through familial inheritance, a couple who got one as a gift, and one lucky bastard who found his in a river. I pondered what balls, what arrogance, allowed someone to wear one. And profoundly, what self-confidence? It was like they were almost an alien race. Was I not worthy?
There is a Melvin element in that. Surely, he’d feel or voice contempt for such a display, claim it was a waste of money, that the wearer was, in fact, insecure and just trying to show off and, at some level not too far below the surface, feel himself threatened. It was envy I think, a case of the material manifestation of success, and that confidence, which was a putdown to him.
Though I echoed Dad’s sentiments because that’s what one did to keep their father on a pedestal, his sentiments didn’t ring true, not then, not for decades later.  Fifty years or so after first being intrigued, Dad’s inhibiting influence has given way to a purchase. There.
            A few dozen years of therapy (the cost of which would cover many Rolexes, by the way) helped me realize I wanted a Rolex for its own merits. And mine. Until I gave out my credit card details I had wanted one as a gift.  I wanted it as an award, a badge, something deserved. It’s as if I wanted to have the approval of someone to justify it. Even when I could readily afford such a thing I needed it from someone else. Or so I felt. At the end of the day, I suppose that someone was Dad. So, my buying one for myself in a way concludes the need for external approval. Thank you, Dad, and thank you, David. Now isn’t that a wise, and deserved, achievement?