In the film To Kill a Mockingbird Gregory Peck explains the legacy of pocket watches passed on from father to son, and I thought how unlikely it will ever be that someone inherits a smart phone  inscribed, “with love to my darling Atticus.”

Watches are not the essentials they used to be. The cell phone generation considers them relics from another time, quaint but unnecessary. I disagree.

I’d been without a watch for weeks after my latest timepiece pooped out. The face tarnished, the strap fell apart. It was a souvenir watch of a famous pretty picture, bought in a gift shop in a Paris museum that allowed me to look at it and say, “half past a water lily.”

Without my watch I could still function, but I missed it.  It goes with my left wrist. Like my wedding ring belongs on my left hand. Sure, I could look at my cell phone and tell the time. But it’s not the same thing.

I pulled up my sleeve and looked at my naked wrist in the same way I automatically checked the carved antique clock on the bookshelf long after its pendulum stopped.  I did find a German clockmaker who got the pendulum swinging again. And now I also have a new watch.

Get, this. It’s a good old Timex, which has gone sexy. Mine is shiny black with multicolored roman numerals and a second hand that goes tick-tick-tick.

My timepieces and I are throwbacks for sure. The clocks and the watch had to be advanced one hour for daylight savings time but unlike my cell phone clock I was in charge.  The cell phone clock sets itself. Springs forward and falls back without my telling it which way to go. Crosses into mountain time before I even know we’re in Colorado. There’s something spooky about a clock with its own mind. I prefer one that will work with me.

When I met my friend Terry for happy hour and showed off my new watch she said, “Some say that wearing a watch dates you.” I pointed out that there are plenty of clues to my vintage before you get to the Timex, but I did notice that she was wearing only silver bracelets on her ageless wrists.

How ironic that a watch could be guilty of making a person look old as if it spoke in terms of years and not in simple hours and minutes,  as in 30 minutes to cocktails.

Actually, my watch, which is the analog variety, with a clock face and numbers – not digital which is so precise, so lockstep – would  indicate it was more like 30-ish minutes.  Time passes more gently, there’s more give and take, when you don’t do digital.  I like knowing that it’s a bit after 4:30, not a stern 4:33 and 17 seconds.

Having said that I will add that I also strive for punctuality. I hate being late.  I certainly beat Terry to happy hour. And one reason is that I set my timepieces a few minutes fast.  To give myself a few extra wiggle minutes. You don’t get wiggle minutes on a cell phone clock.

There are other things you don’t get if you are not a watch wearer.  People are not going to spot you in a crowd and come up and ask, “Do you have the time?”  By asking this it is pretty clear that they are probably one of you, checking the wrist first. It’s a good way to start a conversation and pretty soon you’re talking like old friends. Really old.

When Gabby Giffords took on the NRA she challenged her former colleagues in Congress to do the same, saying, “Be bold. Be courageous.” Only Giffords and those closest to her know how much guts it take for someone whose body, speech and career were forever altered by a bullet to the brain to throw herself into the  nasty debate on gun control and dare her old political pals to be brave like her.

We do not lack for examples of courageous women. And March is a good time to remember a few of them, it being National Women’s History Month and March 8 being International Women’s Day.

Writer philosopher phenomenal woman Maya Angelou holds that, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues. Because without courage,” she said, “you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.”

I think of brave women as those who don’t just go along, who take the tougher route when the easy way  is so well paved.  And these days we need courageous women as much as we ever did, there still being a faction who prefer their women sit down and be quiet.

Here are some recent entries to my Be Brave file:

Eve Ensler – I want to give more kudos to Eve Ensler, the playwright and activist, not just for getting us up and dancing around the world on Valentine’s Day to protest gender violence. But because so much of her hard work has been done while she’s been dealing with stage four cervical cancer. In the middle of chemo and exhaustion and all the dread that goes with cancer she kept bravely fighting the bullies of the world.

Marie Colvin – Called the “uncrowned queen of intrepid journalists,” American reporter Colvin, who wrote for the Sunday Times in London, was killed a year ago while covering the conflict in Syria.  Colvin wore a black eye patch, the result of a grenade injury in Sri Lanka, and often a string of pearls.

Her death and that of other journalists covering the Arab Spring uprisings have sparked an online campaign, A Day Without News, put together by journalists to educate the public on how reporters have become a target of war.

Then there are the topless women in Italy – To protest the notorious misogynist ways of Sylvio Berlesconi, a group of women took off their shirts and scrawled “basta”.. enough.. on their bare skin. The same group, called Femen bared their breasts in Kiev to protest the sex tourist trade, explaining that if they wave banners and march no one notices. But people always pay attention when a bunch of women rip off their tops.

There was some of that bra-shedding nostalgia in Makers, the three hour PBS special about  women’s historic changes the last 50 years, a good reminder of what can be gained when women don’t lose their courage.

Back to today’s bold ones, there should be a special combat award for the military women who are finally calling rape on the officers who routinely sexually abused and humiliated them with impunity. The women’s courage in speaking up, at risk to their career and reputation, may finally force changes in a military justice system which will one day be read as a nasty part of history that took some fearless  women to fix.

I was avoiding Amour, the movie. I’d seen enough previews to know the story line and it frightened me. For a while I was saying I’d sooner see a Die Hard movie than Amour. And I’d have to be dragged to one of those brutal movies. And then sit through most of it with my eyes closed and then rant about Hollywood glorifying violence.

But the story of an older couple with one in sad decline would require eyes open and there would be nothing to glorify except for the fantasy of living in a book-filled apartment in Paris.

I said, I’m not sure I’m ready to see this. My husband asked, why not? It’s about people getting old. We’re going to get old. The point is to get old, he said. I conceded.

My mother had Alzheimer’s. One of my best friends had dementia. I know those blank eyes. My sister and I vow to stash pills so we can end things before that happens to us. A friend said that when he starts to lose it his wife promises to push him off the ocean cliff. It’s a joke. Kind of.

My generation is famous for thinking we can age differently than our parents. We determinedly go to the gym, watch our salt intake, do crossword puzzles and take Spanish. We haven’t figured out a way not to die or not to get a terrible illness or be run over by a truck. But in general we think we’re maintaining better longer.

I’ve been writing about women and aging since I crossed into my 50s, nearly two decades ago. Back then the fear of aging for me and my contemporaries was not dying so much as being treated like an old person. The fear was of becoming irrelevant and discounted solely because of a birth date. And we’ve fought that well. Society likes old people so much they think we should keep working into our 70s.

But life’s realities have continued. My parents and my husband’s parents are gone. We’ve moved to the front of the line. “We are all becoming die-able,” I said after a funeral for a friend.

Right now I look at illness and infirmity in the way I approach life in earthquake country. Most days I don’t worry about the earth cracking open, but then there is a surprise jolt, a reminder that oh yes, that could happen here, too. To me, to us.

At the movie theater a woman in our row kept hissing to her companion, “This is so depressing.” Well of course, it was. It was unflinching. There was no sugar-coating. But it wasn’t unbearable.

And there it was, the final challenge, even for Baby Boomers.

We meet the couple, Anne and Georges, too late to know much about them. We know they were intellectuals, musicians and teachers and had a daughter and a swell apartment. We don’t know their politics. Or their friends. We don’t know how they met. Did they have regrets?

The 85-year-old actress Emmanuelle Riva, who plays Ann, said in an interview that doing the role exorcised her fear of death. I’m not sure the film did that for me. I know it did not exorcise my fear of losing control at life’s end. I’m still frightened of the prospect of my brain clicking off and losing my ability to be me.

But hurray for a movie that isn’t afraid to take a long, quiet, sometimes agonizing look at what we know will come to us all, in one form or another. And asks if we will manage it with grace and kindness.

My husband and I saw the movie on Valentine’s Day. We skipped dinner and ate popcorn and walking home, we stopped for ice cream. Two big scoops with hot fudge.