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.

We have a trim little Snowshoe Siamese cat named Kit Kat who is a lizard chaser. This is a dangerous occupation in Southwest Florida -- not because of the Cuban anoles which are generally everywhere but because of the five-lined skinks that are secretively somewhere.

Cats on Pine Island catch and eat these skinks, usually in the spring or the fall when the skinks are jazzing and jittering in the leaves. If Kit Kat could talk she'd probably say, "I never met a skink I didn't want to eat." Vets may be in disagreement about this. But we have seen at least three dozen cats that have eaten five-lined skinks and afterwards suffered serious neural collapse. After the skink feast, the cats cannot walk. Some end up partially blind, palsied and perturbed for life. If they live. Many die.

If you want some facts on this phenomena, google my article for Gulf Coast Life Magazine. I still get email (after quite a few years) from the article I wrote about cats and skinks. Kit Kat is a hardy survivor. She wobbles when she walks, but she still gets skinks. After twelve years of the neural twitches, she still captures the elliptical and toxic lizards. I have talked to some veterinarians who believe the skink only becomes toxic at certain times of year and possibly, only when they are mating. Kit Kat's job remains as a bounty hunter of five-lined Florida skinks.

The other day, she surprised us by lying down in a bed of red and green chile that we order every autumn from a company in Hatch, New Mexico. Is this where Kit Kat got her appetite for eating things too hot to handle? By watching us eat red hot chile peppers?

We believe what doesn't kill you may heal you. In the case of chile peppers, there's plenty of evidence that these red hot wonders of the plant world are loaded with capsicum. Topically, capsicum can be used to heal the pain of osteo-arthritis, so states Dr. Andrew Weil. He also says that oil of capsicum can relieve toothache for months. Dr. Laura Shields has stated that eating chile can lower cholesterol (LDL) and prevent heart disease. Whatever: we eat it because we like it. And because we lived in New Mexico for most of our adult lives.

Kit Kat has no such story. The moment we opened our Hatch chile box, she came right up, lay down in a bed of chile peppers and stayed in a state of capsicumal bliss for quite a few hours.

Cats know best. Maybe the skinks mess up her nervous system but also promise her immortality. She's going on fifteen and, rattly or not, she's as kittenish as the day we got her. Nonetheless I'm not going to advise anyone to catch and roast a skink. Eat more chile. But before you do, lie down in a bed of it for a while and have some chile dreams on me.

Every so often I think of my friend Virginia Kherdian saying, "Writers certify the places where they live and they make them possible for other people to live there. Cities and towns, mountains, and valleys -- once written about -- become certified."

I visited Carmel, California so I could see poet Robinson Jeffers' handmade stone house carved into a niche by the sea. It was smaller than I imagined but it certified the surroundings well enough with its stern, stone authenticity. A great poet touched every one of those rocks, I said to myself, as I touched them too.

What tree hugger hasn't been to Walden?

What Hemingway addict hasn't touched down at Key West and seen the old Spanish style house at 907 Whitehead?

And I wonder how many readers have gone to Guilford, Vermont and taken the little back country dirt road along the Green River to see poet Bob Arnold's blackboard perched above the road. There are poems, fresh poems, every day on that blackboard, and set off in the hillside there is a stone house like Jeffers' and two more gnome houses, as I like to say, bejeweling the hills, chock full of books, a printing press and other mysteries. The main house is bright red, beaming with passion. The land all round is all round, as Gertrude Stein might say.

You get a feeling a poet lives there. I've dubbed the place Arnoldia. It's fully certified and if Richard Brautigan imagined houses made from watermelon sugar, I can just as easily imagine Arnoldia's sculpted out of maple sugar. But enough metaphor. Let the poet speak for himself.

SUN UP

I get up with
The birds who
Get up with me


WAIT

All evening
A swallow has
Swept the grassy
Farmyard for one
Shed goose
Feather to stitch
Into her nest --
It is easy enough
For me to pick
Up -- but I watch
Instead, until
She has it

___

I showed one of Bob's books to a friend at a party the other night and I read a few aloud by candlelight. Someone said, "I could write those. I could write like that!" I smiled, and thought, Sure you could. But you would have to be a Zen master and write poetry for the next fifty years.

Cid Corman put it better, I think, when he said this about Bob's writing --"Every word is love, loved, lovely. What else is poetry?"

I have known Bob Arnold and loved his poetry for more than thirty years. We've known each other that long, but only one year ago did we meet for the first time in the flesh. I journeyed from Florida up to Arnoldia. I wasn't disappointed; it's a magical dimension of the human soul and right now a beckoning dream of autumnal nature, and there's a bonus -- you get to meet Bob's wife Susan. Susan's the star of so many of his finest poems -- she lives and breathes in all of them, giving his poetry the scent of a woman as well as the green, gold, and russet leaves.

Virginia was right. Places in the world are certified by poets and writers in poems, stories and novels and after reading about these special places of the heart, we gaze upon them differently. You may never reach Arnoldia with your own two feet, but your eyes will take you there, and so can I. Visit Longhouse -- see my link up on the left hand margin? Read the interview with Bob and then curl up with a copy of Once in Vermont.