Time Swimmer is just out with Macmillan Caribbean. You can see it posted at 'gerald's bookstore' on this very site. A student asked me yesterday -- "What book has the most of YOU in it?" We forget sometimes that kids like to know their author as much as they want to read their author's novel. How do you know an author, if you don't know one? I remember when I was twelve. I used to stand at the mailbox of an author who lived in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey where we were living, and I just stared at his name. The author had written a book about man-eating tigers. And I stood there in front of his mailbox inhaling his name, as if that, all by itself, would make me a writer.

Some years later, on Lake Buel in Massachusetts, I overheard two fishermen talking on the lake one misty morning. The conversation went something like this --

--What'd'ya say your name was?

--Frank Jacobs

--Mine's Harney Wilcox.

--Nice t'meet'ya.

--Same.

--What'd'ya do for a living, Frank?

--I am a writer for Mad Magazine.

At that point I almost fell into the lake. Was this really Frank Jacobs, the man whose words we roared over? Why was he in a boat? The man could walk on water!

I stayed around until Frank docked his boat and then I rushed over to meet him. He turned pale when he saw how nuts I was to meet him. "You really know my name?" he asked putting away his lures. Enraptured, I nodded. I'd lost the ability to speak.

Now I go into schools and read from my books and sometimes I get a response not unlike the one I gave Frank fifty-two years ago, in 1957.

So -- when the student said -- "What book has the most of YOU in it?" I told him Time Swimmer, which is just, just, just out.

"What's it about?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "the story's full of spiders that are men and lizards that are gods all mixed together in a pepperpot stew of fantastic spice that is history and fantasy together -- it's a book about things that never happened amidst things that did. For instance, there's a scene with Nazis in U-boats prowling the harbor of St Lucia in the West Indies. There's the story of the only man who survived the Mount Pelee volcanic eruption of 1902; that was the volcano that killed some 28,000 people in a few minutes, and . . ."

"And that's all about YOU?" the student asked, in wonder.

I answered, "It's about ME, the storyteller. I let myself go in this book. I let myself go completely and told everything I knew about living in the Caribbean. Everything I'd ever absorbed, thought about, heard about, walked into, fell into, dropped off of, just everything!"

After I said that, I was pretty much done and headed over to the table where all my books were displayed and every copy of Time Swimmer was sold.

"They want to know all about YOU," a teacher told me with a wry smile.

Time Swimmer is my favorite book. Of course it's my most recent and it hasn't given me any grief. Sometimes books do. Give grief. One time, when I was starting out, a novel I wrote was given to a woman dying in a hospital in Billings, Montana. The woman died reading my book and her son wrote me a mean letter telling me that my book was DEADLY.

Well, Time Swimmer is a novel that is hard to put down -- so the kids tell me. But it's not deadly. It tells of some deadly events in human history, but it won't kill you to hear them. Once, anyway.

A boy at a school in West Palm Beach asked me last week, "What is the worst thing that can happen to an author?"

I said, "His reader can stop turning pages."

"How do you know," he questioned, "if this reader of yours has quit...do you have a hidden camera coded into every page?"

I laughed. "Yes," I said, "That's how I know. And are you going to be a writer?"

"I might."

That's good enough for me.

We just returned from a school visit at Buena Vista Elementary School, in Greer, South Carolina. You may not think it gets cold there, but let me tell you, it does. Lorry and I wore multiple shirts and sweatshirts one night. The following day at the school, Karen Grimwood, the librarian, met us with a smile and showed the acrostic poems the children had written. Many of them were excellent. That reminded me to share the Tangletalk poem that a student shared with us, first in Rochester, New York, and then again, in Sebastian, Florida. Tangletalk is just what it says: a tangled version of a story. Riddle-like and nonsensical, it nonetheless has a certain sense all its own.

One fine day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight
back to back they faced each other
Pulled their swords and shot each other
The deaf policeman heard the noise
And came and shot the two dead boys
If you don't believe this lie is true
Ask the blindman, he saw it too.

Tifanee Terrell
Sebastian Elementary School

It's lovely to hear poetry in schools. And also to see it in action on the streets, in the workplace, everywhere. As the poet Ruth Krauss once said in a very short poem:

Hooray
for every day!

After our school visit in Greer, we read newspapers and books and generally took it easy, but that evening we went out and ate dinner at a great Italian restaurant where a large group of ladies sat at a table. All of them had red hats and purple sweaters, sweatshirts, dresses and jackets. What a sight. Lorry told me, "They are members of the Red Hat Society," and she repeated the verse that got them started. It's from a poem written in 1961 by Jenny Joseph and it goes like this.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
with a red hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me . . .

Oh, seeing is believing, all the red hats on that merry cold night and the purple garments and the loud banter of the ladies too. And the opening of the poem keeps ringing in my ears. Coleen Salley, the great storyteller of New Orleans, always wore a hat to her book signings. My brother, the cowboy folksinger and illustrator, always wears his hat. Mine's hanging on a hook by the door. Think I'll go get it right now.

I have written of Kit Kat, our snowshoe Siamese in another blog. If you haven't read that one -- The Cat Who Ate Skinks and Slept on Chiles -- scroll down and check it out. Among other things, it's about Kit Kat's nine lives. Here in Florida, cats get sick after eating skinks. Sick to death, in some cases. Ours beat the rap and now is a famed chile puss. (Read my other blog and this one and you'll see why.)

Our friend Holly Sedgwick liked the blog pic of Kit Kat and she painted our cat in all her glory. I wanted to buy the painting and found out that it was beyond my budget, but Holly, sweetheart that she is and very generous, sent me, or rather sent Kit Kat an email from Holly's cat in Toronto. From a cool cat to a hot one, this electronic communique saying that Kit Kat's portrait was coming south.

When we opened the package, the painting smelled delectably of oil paint. And there was Kit Kat with red and green fish and blue-tailed skinks swimming over her head. Her eyes were as mysterious as the princes and princesses of Siam that these cats are said to have guarded in long ago times.

We showed Kit Kat the painting. She regarded it with some small alarm, as if to say, "What am I doing there?"

I put the painting in my office so that I could gaze at it whenever I wanted to. Last night, I paused while typing and looked at the portrait. Kit Kat, the real feline was in front of her painted image dozing on a stack of paper. Not just any pile of paper. Kit Kat was resting on Holly the painter's unpublished autobiography. Does art imitate life? Or does life, in this case, imitate art?

Kit Kat was making some sort of statement. She'd made peace with her portrait and was saying,"What you have here is a great painting of a noble cat."

Cats know everything.
Ask any cat.
Better yet, observe their preferences.
They'll point you in the right direction.

The first story I learned as a five-year-old wasn't a story -- it was something that happened to me. Afterwards it became a story. Now it's one of my favorites and I tell it often. I told it last Saturday at Koucky Gallery & Gardens in Bokeelia on Pine Island on the Southwest Coast of Florida. That's just in case you want to visit the gallery sometime.

I started off with that story, the one of me age five standing in front of my father's cornfield. The hired hand came out of the golden tassles, smiling. He had something long and slinky in his hand. A snake. When he got up to me, he dropped the heavy, smooth, long gleaming snake around my neck. I stood there not knowing what to do. Then the hired hand whose name was Ray folded the snake a time or two and said, "How's that for a copperhead necktie?"

Kids ask -- "Was that snake dead or alive?"

"Dead," I tell them, adding, "but the sun was still up."

"What's that got to do with it?" a girl asks.

"Well, you can't tell if a fresh killed snake's all-the-way dead until the sun goes down." Ray told me this on that fateful day. I've also not forgotten how the snake's tail stopped twitching just as the sun sank behind the cornrows.

I told some other favorites at Koucky's. The death of Edward Teach, the unkillable pirate named Blackbeard. And another true story of how Jamaican mice steal eggs and drink from coconuts -- that story's in my book Doctor Bird: Three Lookin' Up Tales from Jamaica. I like to tell it and read it and I love to talk about those clever egg-stealing mice who never break a shell even if they roll an egg off a tall countertop and somehow manage to carry it down to the tile floor and out the door and into the woods. No one can ever guess how the mice do it. But I know. I saw it happen in the kitchen at Blue Harbour on the North Coast of Jamaica near Port Maria in the parish of Saint Mary. You'll have to be there for that one, I'm not giving away any secrets.

A couple times while I was talking at Koucky's, I looked out at the gardens and their beauty dazzled my eye. Especially the bougainvillea. The sunlight and shadow and flowering plants sent me straight to Jamaica. Stories will do that. Teleport you to the realm where the story's taking place. (Isn't that why we read and listen to tales? For the mystic ride on the magic carpet of the imagination.)

Once I told a Jamaican story about a friend named Roy. I was in New Mexico at the time. Roy said he felt the words of the story touch him in Jamaica. "Did you know I was listening?" he asked. I said, "I felt something."

"Did you hear a little ringing in your ear?"

"I think I did." I often hear a ring tone in my ear.

Roy said, "That was me ringing you up!"

I finished at Koucky's by telling the story of the ghost house in Sherman, Texas. "Real ghosts?" the kids ask. "Yes, real!"

This is not a story so much as a sound poem. Noises of all kinds. I make 'em and I use a train whistle and a harmonica for special effects but mostly it's just high pitched squeaks and whines and groans and unexplainable timber-shaking blasts. Most of these can be spelled out -- S-H-E-R-M-A-N. All the ghosts in this noisy little drama have one thing in common -- they like to say Sherman! I have no idea why this makes people laugh, but it happens. Now, one time I was explaining to a friend I've known all my life about this silly little sound poem, and she said, "Do it for me!"

I asked her, "Why?"

She said, "I was born and raised in Sherman, Texas."

"You see any ghosts there?" I asked.

"I'm not telling 'til you tell me the story."

"It's not really a story."

"Well, do whatever you do then," she said, "I want to hear it."

"I have to be scared to tell Sherman," I said.

It's the honest truth. I can't tell it, wing it, or sing it, unless it gives me goosebumps. Oh, oh. I feel a little prickly right now...

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.