I am a would-be journalist, though I have no training in that field and have never sought it out and nobody has appeared on my doorstep asking me to be one.  My dream career--besides the one I already have--would be to travel the English-speaking world and write about places and people I meet.

Most of the traveling I've done this winter is vicarious, in books and movies.

Calvin Trillin's book, Killings, is a collection of previously published essays in The New Yorker, all having to do with murders and unexplained sudden deaths.

"I sometimes read murder mysteries, and the ones I find absorbing are those that evoke a specific place.  I'm more interested in what life is like in a Boston hospital or on the Navajo reservation than I am in who done it."

When he goes to a place to write about a killing he gets to know the victim (through stories) and the killer.  He follows the trial.  He talks to townspeople.  He acquaints himself with the prejudices and cultural beliefs of the place.  "When someone dies suddenly, shades are drawn up, and the specificity of what is revealed was part of what attracted me."

May Sarton's journal, At Seventy, describes an entirely different kind of place--her own personal country of being seventy. I am reading this book to prepare myself for my actual arrival there.

"What is it like to be seventy?  If someone else had lived so long and could remember things sixty years ago with great clarity, she would seem very old to me.  But I do not feel old at all, not as much a survivor as a person still on her way.  I suppose old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward, but I look forward with joy to the years ahead and especially to the surprises that any day could bring."

"In the middle of the night things well up from the past that are not always cause for rejoicing--the unsolved, the painful encounters, the mistakes, the reasons for shame and woe.  But all, good and bad, painful or delightful, weave themselves into a rich tapestry, and all give me food for thought, food to grow on."

She relates a recent poetry reading in which someone in the audience asked her, "Why is it good to be old?"(after she had said that she felt she was in the best time of her life.)

"Because I am more myself than I have ever been.  There is less conflict.  I am happier, more balanced, and more powerful." She goes on to say that what she should have said is "I am better able to use my powers....I am surer of what my life is all about, have less self-doubt to conquer...."

As I, at 69, am looking ahead and wondering what the next stops on this life journey will be like, May Sarton at 70 did the same.  She writes about Camille Mayran who wrote "a magnificent book in her nineties" and who tells her that "well over ninety, she sees so change in herself except for a slight slowing down.  She [Camille] is all soul and mind...."