Lorologiese.com – Chronoservice.ch Sagl © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Made With ♥ In Aldeia
A Dial for the Moon: My Story with Alan Bean and the Omega That Started It All
The first watch I ever owned wasn’t mine, not really. It had belonged to my father—a Lemania chronograph, utilitarian and reliable. It was 1968, I was nine years old when we moved to a new house. It was given to me in a small box. I started wearing it, I knew it had something to say.
Two decades passed before I made the first real choice in this story.
It was 1988, and I was standing in front of the local Omega dealership staring at a Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch priced at Fr. 990.
That was nearly a third of my monthly salary.
Still, I bought it. Not because it was wise, but because it was right.
The weight, the shape, the tactile geometry of the
case—there was something about it that felt settled, finished.
I began wearing it every day.
It became a habit, and then it became something more. It became a rhythm.
In those years, learning about watches wasn’t as easy as typing a few words into a browser. The internet didn’t exist. Watch collecting was a private world, passed by word, by mail, or in person.
In 1990, I met Carmelo d`Alessandro from Lemania. He had a quiet intensity about him, the kind you see in people who’ve learned to read objects like texts. His collection of chronographs was a lesson in patience and knowledge. He had spent years studying the differences in bezels,
pushers, hands, fonts—what most people never even see.
Carmelo taught me how to look. We didn’t speak of money. I couldn’t afford any of the rare references he showed me anyway. But theory was enough then. In theory, I owned everything.
That changed when my mother died. There was a small inheritance, Enough to shift things from theory to practice. I decided that I would finally buy a Moonwatch worth remembering.
I found it in the United States. A reference 2915. The first Speedmaster. Broad arrow hands, steel bezel, untouched condition. We negotiated. I sent wire transfers and waited. In the end, it was mine. The weight was different. Not heavier. Just older. Like holding a voice from 1957 that still had something left to say. Then came Susie. We met in 2005. She wasn’t a collector, but she was drawn to the stories. Not just the watches—the missions. She had read everything about Apollo, Gemini, Mercury. She knew the crew rotations, the trajectories, the mission patches. I’d never met someone who could speak about NASA the way she did, with precision but also with a kind of personal stake. We started traveling together. Always with a Moonwatch on my wrist.
Then, in 2009, I wanted to give her something that could match the quiet gravity of the relationship that was building. That’s when Alan Bean entered the story. Bean wasn’t just the lunar module pilot for Apollo 12. He was also the fourth man to walk on the Moon, and the only astronaut to return and become a full-time painter. His works weren’t copies of photographs.
He created textured, mixed-media paintings that carried the surface of the Moon in them—literally. He embedded lunar dust into the acrylic. He pressed his mission patches and tools into the surface. The result was not a representation of the Moon, but an imprint of it.
I had always been called “Bean” as a kid. Some kind of family joke. When I found Alan Bean’s website, it felt like something had come full circle. I wrote him. Just a simple email.
He replied immediately.
That first message opened a door that stayed open for over six years. We exchanged dozens of emails. He sent me sketches, notes, updates. He told me what he remembered from the Ocean of Storms, from the way lunar dust clung to his boots and refused to let go. I ordered a painting
called As Beautiful As Can Be. It took four years to receive.
Alan explained that everything was done by hand, that the waitlist was long because the work was slow. He didn’t just paint; he re-experienced. He relived it. And every canvas carried the weight of memory, not just pigment.
The painting arrived in 2013. It hangs on my wall now, but sometimes I still see it the way it looked when I first opened the crate—quiet, tactile, full of surface and depth. I gave it to Susie.
She cried. I didn’t expect that. Later that year, we traveled to Cape Canaveral. Then Houston. We met Alan in person. He took us to lunch at Frenchie’s, a small restaurant where astronauts eat when they’re not in orbit. It was nothing special on the surface—plastic tables, vinyl menus—but the conversations carried altitude.
For that occasion, I had something made for him. A Speedmaster dial. Not an original, but a custom piece celebrating Apollo 12. A friend in Switzerland who does signage work helped with the design.
The printing is coarser, the layout humanly imperfect. But it carried a kind of truth. It wasn’t about the dial—it was about the gesture.
Alan held it in his hand for a time. He didn’t say much. Just smiled, then thanked me. He had that way about him—direct, soft-spoken, and somehow beyond the moment.
I still wear the 2915. It doesn’t keep perfect time. But it keeps a kind of memory. Watches aren’t made to last forever.
Neither are people. But something stays. This isn’t a story about objects. It’s a story about continuity—of seconds, of friendships, of love.
It’s the story of a man who learned to tell time by listening to machines, and who found, in the silence between ticks, something like meaning.
Alan passed away in 2018. Susie and I are no longer together but are still fiends. But the Moon remains, distant and unchanging.
And somewhere in the quiet rooms of my home, the watches
still tick.
One second after the other. Like steps. Like memories falling back into orbit.