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.