"One good thing about growing old," someone one time told me, "is not having to worry about one's future any more."

This seems to have been true for me. "Let someone else worry about the loose leg on the sofa," I tell myself. "Or finding a painter for the kitchen cabinet." My former sense of urgency is gone.

There are many changes to be made in life styles with aging. Much of my time today is spent in looking for lost things. Glasses. My wallet. The name of some person whose name begins with 'M' I need to speak with. It continues to elude me. But later, when it is no longer needed, the name will return.

Travel presents another problem. A trip today entails the confirmation of an aisle seat on the plane. This is followed by a frantic search for my 1990 driver's license that will be necessary for identification when getting on. Once at the airport, however, seated in a wheelchair and rolling past long lines of people and passing through closed gates without challenge, old age travel takes an upward swing.

Meetings, appointments, and ringing telephones diminish with growing older, and it is therefore a good idea to take along some piece of what your life has been before. I took writing. Editors change and new writers come and go, but this doesn't mean one can no longer write. Writing can be done on a bus or in a hospital or in bed. When something interesting comes my way I always start by taking notes, so that, even today, I sleep always with a pad and pencil handy in case the right word may be waiting for me in the dark.

The fact that I am 90 sometimes seems inconceivable. My youngest son should be 6, as youngest sons so often are, not 60. A young man with a familiar name whom I speak to at a cocktail party turns out not to be the son, but the grandson, of the person I had one time known. This often leads me to a feeling of being out of date. I have no fax or e-mail. I don't know how to "have a nice one," and www.abcdefg.com is a mystery to me.

Dying has always seemed as normal to me as being born. With aging, however, the dying has taken on a more concrete form. There is what to give to whom and where and how. Accounts of persons who have returned to life after being legally declared dead, report moving though a long dark tunnel into the great illumination on the other side—so that I now wait with interest for the great illumination and the poignancy of saying good-bye to friends that will be the last page of my growing old.