Our Armenian friend in Fresno used to read our fortunes. First she poured the thick sweet Turkish coffee into the tiny cup. Then when we got to the bottom where the grounds looked like mud, she'd turn the cup upside down, wait a few minutes, and tell our fortune. She usually batted about 100% -- in terms of fortunes coming true. The secret of her success? She was a serial optimist. Never saw a cup she didn't like or a fortune that wasn't fair. No one who received her gift of knowledge ever heard a discouraging word. Once she told me -- "Oh, I see a letter with a check in it!" Two days later, the letter came with surprising funds. Often she'd say, "You're going on a journey! It's going to be fun." "Well, I have to drive home," I told her. "Yes -- what fun!"

In Miami our daughter took us to a great Middle Eastern restaurant where we lingered for hours. The meal ended with Turkish coffee. Naturally I read everyone's cup just as I was trained to do in Fresno. "Oh, you're going on a journey...you will soon see lots of money!" And so on. The wife of the restaurant came over to our table and listened for a little while and then she offered me a job reading coffee cups for her customers. "Like in the old country," she said. My grandfather, who came from "the old country" would laugh. He who read the Harvard Classics, every page scored with marginal notes and words he looked up in the dictionary. He spoke with a heavy Hungarian accent, English wasn't easy for him. But he was a great reader. As is everyone in our family.

And now we turn to my granddaughter Shai pictured below. It's Christmas day in that snapshot -- or rather Christmas night. Everyone's off to bed. But Shai. She's reading the book we gave her -- Claudia Gray's Evernight.

Shai's the girl who wouldn't read when she was younger. Then one day last summer she started reading. And now she's a teen demon devourer of supernatural tales. This would make my grandfather happy. As well as our friend, the coffee cup reader in Fresno.

I always knew you'd be a reader, Shai. A coffee cup told me so.

I remember things -- I really do.

This morning I received an email from a middle school girl who wrote to me in 1999 and asked me to come to her school in Accord, New York. Now, it just so happened that I knew a great teacher from that school. Later on my teacher friend arranged for me to come and do several days of storytelling and classroom visits. We had a wonderful time. The student who wrote -- "I wish you could come to my school", well, she must be at least 17 or 18 years old now.

Three years ago I received an email while I was in Princeton, NJ storytelling. This email was very special to me because the person writing it was a student my first year teaching in 1969. I learned that she'd lived a very interesting life -- had seven children, was a singer, painter, poet, musician, dancer, and teacher! She's now writing her autobiography.

I have fun with these old friends. We share some really mystical memories.

Unusual events take place when you travel around telling stories. In Accord, for example, I told a story about an earthquake. Shortly after I left the school there was an earthquake throughout the state of New York. A student wrote to me asking if my story started it. Maybe you shouldn't tell that story any more, he suggested.

Once in central Florida -- through no story of mine -- I was interrupted in the middle of a tale by the announcement that school was cancelled due to a tornado. We got out of there fast but the tornado followed us down I-95. We finally shook it off around the town of Holiday -- fitting, isn't it?

One time at an outdoor reading, a crow flew by and dropped a big white poop on my head. You probably guessed I was reading a poem about crows.

In Seattle, I read a poem about Geronimo. A girl came up to me afterwards and said she was a White Mountain Apache and a relation of the great warrior.

I don't forget any of these crystal moments of magic. Not one. I think they're really the reason I do what I do.

In El Paso I was telling some animal tales. A girl asked me if I liked gliders. I thought she meant planes and I nodded. Then she opened her purse, which was a soft woven bag and inside there was a family of baby sugar gliders. Of course they got loose and went all over the room. How could I forget that?

The best one of all was when I was telling a coyote story and a guy in the back of the room would yodel when I came to the word coyote. I stopped saying it. Afterwards, I was signing books and a man came up to me and said, "Remember me?" It was the coyote kid, only he was an older man. Not just any older man -- I surely recognized him. He had been my college English teacher back in 1965.

Oh, the places you will go and the fun you will have. Look out for that earthquake. Get away from that tornado. Aren't those sugar babies cute. Remember me, the coyote yodeler?

I remember all of you and thanks for remembering me!

Kids take you by surprise. That's what's so fun about school visits.

I did a talk the other day at Gulf Elementary School. I've been going to Gulf for at least ten years now. Liz Olancin, who runs the Gifted Program at Gulf, asked me to visit the school in 1996 as I recall, and each year when Thanksgiving rolls around, she invites me to return and tell stories to her very bright, polite and curious students. During lunch break there is a serious "potlatch" feast for everyone and it includes everything from squash casserole to yellow rice and beans, and from venison and turkey to pumpkin bread and plain old white cake. It'a quite a bit like a real American Indian potlatch, or as they're known in New Mexico, Feast Day. Check Greg Pleshaw's blog on visiting Tesuque Pueblo on Feast Day, November 12 entry.
http://gregoryp.blogspot.com/

The first American Indian story I ever heard was at Tepper's Department store in Plainfield, New Jersey. It was at the Boy Scout emporium where they sold camp pack rations for would-be trailblazers. My mom brought my brother Sid and me to storytellings where tribal people met and swapped tales. Curiously, in America in the 1950s, it wasn't powwows where you heard such things -- it was department stores. Just a little bit of sawdust left over from the days of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. My dad, born in 1900, went to see Buffalo Bill in person when he brought his Wild West Show to Manhattan in 1908. My mom studied Indian lore with Ernest Thompson Seton in Central Park. Seton, as some will remember, was co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America, and as everyone knows, the Boy Scouts are a combination of old woodcraft from tribal people mixed up with para-military lore from WWI. Oh, what a complex stew America is!

To bring it all back home, I talk about these things when I visit schools. Give students a sense of history, if possible, but also tell them -- or let them guess -- how old I am. A teenage girl came up to me in Orlando where I was recently telling stories for the National Teen Trendsetters Conference. She studied me close-up for a second, then said, "You're old!" I said, "How many old timers can do this?" Bent down in a flash, touched my toes. I do other tricks to show them my body isn't exactly cooperating with the aging process, but only when my wife isn't around. She doesn't like to see me to a dive roll on a tile floor. But I do that only when they say, "Wow! You're ancient!"

I suppose I should feel grateful that I'm "old." It gives me something to talk about. Moreover, something to dive roll about. And my stories, well, they have some age on them too. Take the one about Windigo, the mystery phantom deity of the northeast woodland people. I heard that tale from a man named Grey Owl in 1955. Grey Owl was well up in years by then. Our combined ages now would make that story a couple hundred years old today, but it goes way back. Who knows how old the windigo tale is? The Crows used to say stories were measured in time by snows -- so, a story like windigo could be "A thousand snows ago."

I tell an American folktale called Who's Got MY Big Fat Toe? First heard it when I was a Cub Scout. Studying the origins of that one, I discovered almost every culture on earth has a classic story of retribution concerning a lost body part -- a hand, usually. There is, in fact, a very scary one about the hand that creeps through the forest at night, and it's a spinoff of the toe tale, or the reverse. The moral of them all is -- do not bring body parts home! Especially -- Do not put them under your pillow! Moral: They do not belong to you!

My stories come from all over and they fly out all over when I tell them. Once, in Germany, a boy told me my shark story about Dana, the 250 pound man who was bitten by a shark and walked on water to his boat. This is a true story and I've never heard it bettered, but this boy in Germany stood up in a large audience and said, "I know a better shark story." I told him to tell it. The boy said, "My uncle caught a shark and pulled it into his boat and the shark bit his head off." "What happened then?" I asked. The boy shrugged, "He died." That brought down the house.

At Gulf Elementary School where this little sortie of tale-telling began, a boy asked me, "Who is your favorite author?" I told him, "Robert Louis Stevenson."
He appeared disappointed. "Why aren't YOU your favorite author?" he asked.

I haven't an answer for that except that at home I sometimes rewrite parts of books that I have published. There's always a better way to say it. Especially when you wrote it.

Every fall and spring I am on the road visiting schools, museums, galleries and gatherings. I was in Miami last weekend telling stories and making "sounds" for the Children's Museum Sound Month program. I learned to do audio noises, ambient sounds when I was a kid. This is how it happened . . .

On the way to school, the big boys made the little boys feel even littler in the back of the bus. How did they do this? They belittled us, of course. That included smacking our hairdos, which, in the 1950s, was a punishment that you felt all day long because you had worked your hair into a state of perfection, Elvis or Gene Vincent style, and then cemented it in place with a certain hair glue called Vitalis.

My hair looked like the tailfins on a 1957 Chrysler, swept up, slicked back and duck-tailed. Then the big kids messed it up in the back of the bus. I would've sat in the front of the bus but the girls occupied all those seats. What this has to do with making sounds is this -- I became a soundman in the back of the bus when I learned, by accident, that the noises I made while I was inventing stories at home by myself were amusing to my torturers.

The big bullies would say, "Do the squirrel." I'd become a scolding squirrel. "Do old Lady Henshaw," and I would, I'd bring her right up out of her Halloween spooky woods half-finished house. Every town in the 1950's had an old lady who lived in an unfinished house in the woods and was considered to be a witch. I wrote about all this in the novel Doctor Moledinky's Castle: A Hometown Tale.

However, way before I wrote the book, I made up stories and sounds and pretty soon the back of the bus became my personal sound studio and I could have any seat I wanted. Later on, in high school, I did announcements on the PA system and used my special sound effects to capture people's interest. I never stopped making weird noises, some of which are natural ones you hear in the woods -- last night I had a conversation with a Great Horned Owl. I've also talked to shrews, eagles, snakes, toads, cats, dogs, but always, KIDS. And kids, let's face it, make the funniest sounds of all.

At the Children's Museum in Miami I did a series of stories that turned into a series of sounds because that's what the kids wanted to hear, and when I was finished, I asked the audience what it was I had done. A boy jumped up and took the mic and said, "You told stories, made noises but the best part -- it was FREE!" Here, here. Thanks to the Museum and a grant from Target. But I've done my share of street theater performances, too. And they're often free. I once did a performance at Barnes & Noble and my audience was moms and newborns.

I don't know how that happened but it did. I had never done a storytelling for babies, so this was a challenge I looked forward to, and I went to work with -- you guessed it -- sounds. I did hummingbirds on the wing, elephants on the loose, dogs howling, winds blowing, eagles whistling and chortling, hawks screaming, water boiling, mermaids blowing bubbles, and after about twenty minutes of silliness, I looked up and every baby in the store was giggling or smiling or at least dreamily drooling.

It's fun being a storyteller.

Best of all, it's free.

Especially for me.

(Special thanks to Debbie, Hannah, Amy, Danielle and the whole staff of the fabulous Miami Children's Museum!)

Cats have been household guardians since the earliest of times. Before that, they were cave guardians. And before that, they watched us, cold eyed and curious, from the edge of our fat-dripping campfire. Or some such. We have a cat named Dirty Harry. Don't let me go on about how she, not he, got this name. But here she is now the guardian of our online bookstore, Best of the Books.

Harry's room is neither large nor small. Harry, too, is neither large nor small, she's fifteen pounds of feline fur and jowl. Pretty fat for a cat, but not big just well-upolstered in the tummy. You can't tell this from the picture because she's scrunched up in a corner. Harry's against picture taking. In fact, we had trouble getting a shot of her. One day I came into the Book Room to get a certain book and the cold eyes I described above surveyed me from a bookshelf. That was the picture I wanted and I ran out to get the camera. When I came back into the silence of the books, Harry had gone elsewhere.

How long have cats held jobs in libraries? Or been associated with books? Well, the first mention of a cat in print is Pangur Ban, the Celtic puss who whiled the midnight hours with his friend, a monk. As said monk transcribed sacred texts, Pangur captured mice. The ninth century Celtic poem goes . . .

I, and Pangur Ban, my cat
A common task we are at;
Hunting mice is her delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Often times some mouse will stray
Out my sleeve in Pangur's Way;
Often times a thought is set,
Caught quick in my mind's net.

The two of us work as one,
Day moon, night sun.
I who study moral law,
She the keeper of the claw.

___

I read this poem to Harry, but she was unimpressed. Then I told her how hallowed was her library job, and how lucky she was to have it. She gave me a frosty stare. A few hours later, she'd flown the coop, left the library, quit her job at The Book Room. I found her upstairs in the guest bedroom, snoozing. Instead of brow-beating her about her glorious job downstairs, I begged her to come back to work. I patted her and browned her up for business.

A few hours later, Harry was back at work. She'd caught a big cockroach and left it on the carpeted floor, as if to say, "If you want a cat to work, be nice. Honey is better than vinegar."

Now I pay Harry daily compliments and heap the praises on her. Book sales are up, but she politely refuses to read Gray's Anatomy.