Aging My Way
On my weekly visit to the library, I picked up The New York Times Cultured Traveler: 100 Trips for the Curious Mind. It’s a classy anthology about a hundred places, from Agadir to Yogyakarta, that were featured in the newspaper’s travel section.
Reading about exotic and interesting places is high on my list of enjoyable things to do these days. While once that was to discover new and adventurous places to visit, these days it’s mostly only armchair travel — and an opportunity to recall memories of places I’ve visited during my lifetime.
The library book’s first section focused on the United States, so I had much to enjoy, like a story about Alaska’s Inside Passage, which I had experienced on a ferry ride from Haynes Junction to Vancouver in 1999.
But the book’s pages took me back even farther in time when I read an essay about Miami. While I had mostly bypassed the city to spend my time exploring the Everglades when I visited Florida, I had a connection to Miami that I had long forgotten. It was the note at the end of the article that suggested additional reading about the city that jolted my memory:
“The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan. Narrative of Miami’s dark side as seen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Miami Herald,” it read.
Edna was born in 1939, the same year as me, and she also wrote mystery novels, including a series featuring police reporter Britt Montero, that I had read. As a late-blooming and inexperienced reporter, Edna had been one of my role models. But I had completely forgotten all the newspaper stories and books I had read that she had written until her named popped up.
Gads, what else has my old-broad brain forgotten, was my first thought. I then went online and discovered Edna’s books were still in print, and I found and ordered a copy of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. I can’t wait to see what other memories pop up when I reread it.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
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