The weirdness of time

As I put the leftovers I will have for lunch into the microwave I think that these sixteen seconds will never be mine again. Another period of time, however short, is gone. Bing! At my age, I think of these things sometimes. Maybe I have another thirty years to go.
All my life I have thought about time. When I was five I couldn't tell time on our living room clock and it was a frustration to me that it didn't have proper numbers, just modernistic dots that other people could decipher, but not me. I couldn't wait to get a watch, and for all my life, a watch has been indispensable to me. I need to have a clock I can see in the dark on my bedside table. For trips where the clock is problematic, I always take my 'moonglow' watch so I can know even in the dark what time it is. For many years we have had a functioning cuckoo clock and that little bird belts out the hours and half hours faithfully. When sleepless, I hear it in the kitchen. I feel the time passing.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to all that time. There were so many stops in time. In elementary school I looked at the classroom clock at noon on Wednesdays and thought that this week was halfway over, only two and a half days until the weekend when I could read for hours or go out into the woods for adventures.
Each summer I spent a week or so with my friend,Juliet, and her family in a cottage on Lake Ontario. The rule was that no one had a watch or a clock. This was heavenly! We got up with the dawn and spent all day messing about in our canoe and came back to the cottage when it felt like time. We read Shakespeare out loud until the light failed.
There are discreet lumps of time we all have- middle school, high school, college, graduate school- and we remember the events and people and some of the ideas we had then. The years of young marriage, new careers and having young children pass in a blur. I look back (with the help of photo albums) and wish I could have enjoyed it more. But time was passing, and where did it go?
I can't believe I am an elderly person now. I look at the cheeks of my best friend, my age, and see her lined and beautiful face. I am sure I look the same, though in my bones I feel I am the same ten year old I have always been, lithe, skinny and smooth skinned. But now, with all that time passed, I am wiser, fatter, experienced, and more open to new adventures!
Right now, I want to enjoy every moment. But that is as elusive as ever. Sometimes I now forget to put on my watch after my morning shower. But not for long. Soon I must retrieve it so I can start the day and monitor my productivity.