When the big hand of the clock joins the small one, and both are pointing to 12, this Sunday night, it will mark another arbitrary milestone on the road time travels in our life - or the road we travel in its life. We may believe that God created the world 5767 years ago, but there are indications that it is slightly older. We may be celebrating the start of the 2007th year since the birth of Jesus, but we know that he was, in fact, born a couple of years earlier. So let's accept the fact that these milestones are man-made and observed mainly because it is a way for people to organize their lives.

The Gregorian calendar is part of the daily life of most Jews, for the not-so-negligible reason that the date we (or most of us) put on documents, such as checks, is the Gregorian one. So if you are going to send me a check - and do make sure to write "non-transferable" on it - remember that beginning on Monday it is 2007, not 2006.

Those arbitrary dates do make us pause and ponder, grouse and wonder, about our place in time: what have we done up to now, what do we plan to do from now on. Time marches on, but we stand still for a moment and try to get our bearings.

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When I was much younger, I saw myself as being ahead of my time. I was more comfortable in the company of people older than myself. In school I was a teacher's pet, which made me of course pupils' pest. When the boyfriends of my two-years-older sister came to call, I use to monopolize their attention, not realizing that they were nice to me as a way to her heart (or some other part of her anatomy), and not understanding that if looks could kill, my sister's stares would make a corpse of me. I fared less well with her female friends, although that may have been because with them I vied for a different kind of attention.

No Mrs. Robinson

I studied theater and literature - departments heavily populated by the female sex - at Tel Aviv University prior to my compulsory army service. Most of my fellow students were older, having already been through the army. I was still a teenager, while they were young - and attractive - women. I made the grade intellectually, and was moderately witty, or so I thought, but once they discovered my age I was relegated to "friend" status, even when I had "The Graduate" scenario on my mind. Evidently they did not believe that "younger is beautiful". I did not aspire to beauty, of course, but attributed my lack of success to my age. It was only when I turned my attention to my own age group, and fared just as badly, that I began to think that this was not about age. But I diverge.

I did benefit from the friendship of males older and wiser than I, of course, so I did not complain too much.

Lately, however, I have begun to realize that I do not feel so much ahead of my time. If anything, I am starting to feel that I lag behind, which makes me wonder how I managed to miss the point when I was - if ever I was - in synch with time. It's like being in the auditorium an hour before curtain time, or taking the train that comes after you miss your own.

It strikes me as odd that I do not see my kind of people looking eagerly to me as a candidate for their own older and wiser friend. Again, possibly it has nothing to do with time or age, and the problem is my appeal (or lack thereof). But the fact remains: I no longer look to the future with eager anticipation. I look at the past with fond memories and some nostalgic longing.

This is time's doing: it just goes by and refuses to synchronize itself with me. Don't worry: it will happen to you, and there is nothing you can, or must, do about it. I still feel sometimes that I think faster than the people I talk to, or that the drivers on the road are slower than I, but my overall sense is that time is moving faster: columns in this paper must be shorter, the attention span I can count on is shorter. Those grownups who were not yet born when I was already a grownup have no patience for my ramblings. And they march to the beat of time.

So, what is to be done about it? Nothing. It helps if you are aware of it, but not much. Just cheer up and remember: you don't have to think about it for a full year now - that is, 365 days and nights of 24 hours each.

Happy 2007.