My maternal grandfather’s gold pocket watch, bequeathed to me by my mother, hangs on a hook under a bell jar atop a bookcase in my living room. Its crystal is missing, its face has several nicks and scratches, and it has no hands. Its Arabic numerals are in an elegant font that looks italic, leaning slightly forward. I’m guessing that it dates from late 19th-century Odesa, where he emigrated from in the early 20th. I’m holding it now in my left hand as I write, and the weight feels good, substantial, heavy with history, yet also timeless.

The watch I wear on my wrist, a Seiko, I bought in 1989. The font of its numbers, 1 through 12, is also slender and elegant, Italic in inclination, and the crystal is badly scratched from a bicycle crash some years ago that banged up my face but luckily didn’t kill me; it was nobody’s fault but mine, the result of a moment’s inattention. I’ve thought of replacing the crystal, but the scratches serve to remind me of my carelessness and the need to be mindful of where I am and what I’m doing — to pay attention at all times.

I’m thinking about watches and time because I recently went to get the battery changed on the Seiko and while waiting at the jeweler’s I browsed the watches in the glass cases; but they were mostly so big and bulky, with all kinds of fancy functions I’ll never need — all I want a watch for is to tell me the time of day — that impressive and in some cases beautiful as they were, I couldn’t see myself wearing any of them and was happy to retrieve my smaller, slimmer, albeit mindlessly scratched wristwatch, running again.

My father’s dress watch was a delicate, wafer-thin Audemars Piguet, a high-end Swiss brand, which he wore at the peak of his business and social life in the 1950s when he and my mom would go out in the evening to fancy parties and dinners. One of my brothers must have inherited that one, but I still have my dad’s rectangular-faced everyday old Longines with the Roman numerals that he wore to work and the track. It’s missing a band and it’s not my style, but looking at it now I think of him and his hairy wrist, and am glad to have it. It still has hands and a crystal, but like my grandfather’s watch, it tells no time but now.

My father’s father abandoned his family and left no watch; my dad’s father-in-law, whose handless watch I have, was the father he never had. Their antique timepieces, good for nothing now but my nostalgia, are objects that bind me to them in time, heirlooms weaving the generations. I’ve lived longer than either of them, and it feels unreal to me that I, who have memories of them as they were when I was little, the youngest of four siblings, am now an old man, and except for my surviving elder brother, I’m the last of my generation to remember them.

What is time? The older I get, the faster it goes and the more mysterious it is. The hours and minutes marked with the hands of an analog clock or watch go around in circles, signifying the recurrent, circular nature of time, the daily and seasonal cycles, but digital clocks are one-way, linear, like a basketball shot clock or a baseball pitch clock or a football scoreboard counting down the seconds inexorably toward zeroes — a sign of time running out, as it does on us all, more consciously as age does its number on our bodies and gravity grinds and winds us down to nothing.

My home has eight clocks, four of them digital radios, as I’ll be reminded Saturday night when I set them back to standard time from daylight saving. The Arabic numeral 8, turned on its side, signifies infinity. Infinity is the mathematical equivalent of eternity, in which we live for a few minutes.

And so, we are pieces of time that our mechanical timepieces can’t touch, as my grandfather’s watch eternally tells me because it has no hands.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.