For the first time I feel like I have a collection

**dbakiva** · Mar 14, 2015, 08:34 PM

Not a large one, to be sure, and certainly not as impressive as many I've seen, but I have begun to consider it a collection.

I've been a watch fancier for a while, have read the mags, gone to some shows, become familiar with local dealers, I have bought and sold a few watches. I've read and posted on this forum and others for several years. I've talked watches with friends and strangers in airports and in waiting rooms, and (apparently to her...) tried to bore my wife half to death. I've also bought her a few nice pieces that she wears with pleasure. Once in a while she will wear my vintage Datejust, which greatly pleases me. She has amiably tolerated accompanying me on some of my watch foraging treks, like that memorable Manhattan "O" trip ... Tourn-o, Kenjo, Wemp-o, Omeg-o, Seiko ...

When the subject horological comes up (and somehow it does come up), I am often asked if I have a "collection." And my answer usually was on the order of "Well ... I don't know if you'd call it a collection, but I have a few nice watches I like to wear."

With my latest acquisition, an Omega Speedmaster Broad Arrow (automatic Piguet built column wheel movement, cream colored face, blued hands), I begin to see some focus in my small selection. Generalist in nature, based largely I think on function and situations in which a watch is to be worn, it now seems (modest though it may be compared with many here) to have reached a point where each watch has a different area of ... let's say expertise, in which it will be called upon to perform.

So, as it now stands:

Glashütte Original Hand Date, my dress watch
Ulysse Nardin, Gold handwinder (c. 1960s), Dad's dress watch, and the "significant family event" watch ... weddings, funerals, Bar Mitzvahs, etc.
Omega Seamaster GMT "Great White", travel watch, and frequent daily choice
Guinand flieger/chrono, sport watch, worn on NATO or leather strap, filling in as dive style/flieger style, with 12 hour chronograph
Rolex Datejust 16013, vintage piece, worn on black alligator strap, midway between dressy and casual, raised from a pup in 1980
Omega Speedmaster Broad Arrow, column wheel chrono. It will probably be a frequent wearer and a keeper

Though I don't really think of them as part of a collection per se, I also keep a Seiko SNDA65 chrono in the glove compartment of my car (my emergency watch), and at night I usually put on a tritium dialed LL Bean field watch so, when I wake up at 2:45 in the morning I can look at it and know that it is 2:45 in the morning; somehow I think this will comfort me. It is also my most accurate watch, reliably gaining less than a second a month (good deal for about $80 on eBay).