I had to do a search to see if I was going to repeat myself with a story, since the watch thing comes up every so often.
I've liked watches since I was a boy. They've always seemed like the pinnacle of the mechanical age - tiny gears and delicate parts working together to keep accurate time by some miracle. I always had a watch with hands and a date window, even when digital watches were all the rage in the early 70s.
Fast forward to about 1992 or so. I was in my late 20s, Jeanie even younger. I was an apprentice steamfitter with 3 kids making about $600 a week. My wife did not work outside the home, and money was exceptionally tight. She had a household budget that was impossibly tiny in hindsight. The kids wore garage sale and hand-me-down clothes, and I wore mostly work uniforms which were provided as a "benefit of employment". We had to get a loan to buy a 5 year old car when 5 year old cars were pretty cheap.
Things were not going well in our marriage, and it was not entirely clear we were going to make it.
It was at this time that Jeanie gave me the gold-tone Seiko Chronograph, the back of which she had paid to be engraved with a personal note expressing her love and commitment. The watch (which was a couple hundred bucks) was well out of our reach, and the money should have been used for any one of a hundred more practical concerns.
I loved the gift and what it meant, even as the watch went out of style, even as I began to put 2 and 2 together and started climbing my way out of the hole I'd been digging for 10 years. We worked hard on understanding each other, and we began to heal.
I became proficient at my job and gathered a loyal client base. I started a business. We remodeled a home and then built a big one. The kids grew up and we sent them to college and paid for their weddings. I could have easily afforded a "better" watch. But at every big event - the ones that mattered - I wore the watch Jeanie gave me... mostly because it reminded me that my beautiful wife had loved me enough to sacrifice to buy me something very special when there was almost nothing in the tank.
I had that watch on my wrist at my kids' graduations and weddings and at my dad's funeral.
My kids gave me a Citizen Chronograph as a Christmas gift about 5 years ago. It's much more in keeping with my personal style and taste, and I wear it often. I really, really like it - a kind of working-man's Navitimer. The Seiko languished on a shelf for a few years. When I picked it up this summer, it wasn't running.
I figured it just needed a battery. I had it changed, but the watch still wouldn't run. I took it to a watch repair place, and they told me it needed a new movement, and that the movement was an obsolete part. At this point, most people would have walked away from it, which was what the watch repair place told me to do. Nobody spends time and money on a quartz watch
... but it's just not in my nature to walk away from something like this. Jeanie didn't completely understand my persistence with it. Her suggestion was to watch for the exact model to show up on eBay and just swap the backs out.
I couldn't do that, even if it made sense.
I'm really, really sentimental. I don't care a whit about market valuation or the history somebody else has with a thing (cars owned by a random celebrity or with some racing provenance do nothing special for me). What a thing means to me personally, the emotions it brings back, the good memories it calls to mind are what's important.
I think those things are priceless - literally beyond putting a price on. I'll pay whatever it costs in that situation. This watch was given to me by my wife when we had nothing at all, and it didn't look much like we were going to make it as a couple or family. She's still by my side and that watch was going to be back on my wrist, one way or another.
I knew @Robert M was a watch guy and he visited some forums. I went online and got enough information to get the movement number, and to find out that it was kind of an orphan - Seiko made a lot of watches with it, but it had only been in use for a couple of years before they moved on to something better (it was pretty complicated and prone to break). I contacted Robert and he (graciously) went on the hunt like a dog with a bone, looking for a movement for a quartz watch nobody cared about anymore.
He went to the watch boards and found that there was little to no talk about the watches with my movement (the last post was from 2015). He reached out directly to Seiko Customer Service and explained that this was a special piece and asked if they had any direction. He got no joy, but he turned over every rock. I'll never forget how he took on my quest.
We both decided independently (and at about the same time) that my best bet was to buy a working used watch with the same movement and have the watch repair place swap them out. I located and purchased a watch with the right movement on eBay, and had it shipped to me.
I took both watches to the repair shop and had the movements swapped. It worked and I had my watch back.
In 1992, God stepped into our badly fraying marriage and somehow knitted us back together into a seamless whole. That watch was a part of that. I'll be buried with that watch on my wrist.
It's worth a dozen Rolexes to me.
