What is it about clocks that intrigues us? Especially the large, landmark variety? I ponder this as I look forward to meeting my son tomorrow evening under the four sided brass clock in the middle of Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. It’s been everyone’s favorite meeting spot forever.

Famous clocks abound, not only in New York which also boasts of the Times Square digital classic, but also in other cities around the globe. There is London’s Big Ben, although Google® tells me this is really the name of the bell beneath the clock face and not the name of the clock itself. I say this is splitting hairs by now. Or maybe nanoseconds.

Gisborne, New Zealand, has the Millennium Countdown Clock. Since Gisborne is the first city in the world to greet a new millennium, this clock is already counting down the centuries until the start of the third millennium. This is an ambitious task, especially since nobody alive today will be around.

I looked on Google® for other famous clocks and learned of the Glockenspiel in Munich, Germany; St. Mark’s Clock in Venice, Italy; and the 9 O’clock Gun in Vancouver, British Columbia. But I was disappointed when one of my personal favorites didn’t make anybody’s list. It’s the clock that hangs on the corner of the Marshall Field building at Randolph and State Streets in Chicago; and I have met many people there over the course of my connection to that city. I’d hate to think that because the name Marshall Field is gone from the particular building that the clock is less important.

Perhaps the most ominous is the Doomsday Clock of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” which was created to alert the world of the danger it faces from the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This virtual clock appears on the cover of each issue of the bulletin; since 2002, its hands have been fixed at seven minutes to midnight, midnight being symbolic of a cataclysmic end to life as we know it. In a way, this clock is the one under which we all wait.

One month from today I turn sixty-two. Uncle Sam has already contacted me about my Social Security Administration benefits, but so far I’ve ignored him. It’s not that I’m afraid to turn sixty-two; it’s just that I’m still in the work force and need to determine how that fact impacts financially what I do with Uncle.

What I do feel is a growing sense of being old, even in the light of such comments as “Sixty is the new fifty.” Personally, I perceive myself in pretty good shape both mentally and physically, regardless of my chronological age. I take a minimum of medication; I work out regularly; I can still work a crossword puzzle or two. But in a world where youth is not only honored but also held as the permanent ideal. I am becoming obsolete.

It’s true; I don’t have the energy I once did. I don’t have the jawline. And, I don’t have the ambition. At the same time, I still have the desire to be reckoned with in things where I know what I’m doing, to be acknowledged for my current skills and past experience, to be respected as someone who still contributes to society even if it is at a slower pace. Slow is often offset by thoughtful analysis.

I’ve told my family and friends I don’t want to live a long life. And, really, it isn’t about losing one’s faculties or one’s assets. It’s more about losing one’s place in an ever evolving world, where what you learned forty years ago or thirty years ago or twenty years ago or last week more quickly becomes irrelevant as the rate of change accelerates. It’s this factor that makes me feel old.