I was at the Miami Book Fair International for three days this past week. Telling stories. Seeing the unbelievable throngs of people passing between the rows of tents full of books. Being happy. Telling stories. Meeting new friends, seeing some old ones. I read our children's book Three Little Birds which is based on the lyrics of Bob Marley's song.

Bob Marley was born Nesta Robert Marley, February 6, in the Jamaican town of Nine Miles -- Nine Mile is how they say it in Jamaica but it's on the maps as Nine Miles. Anyway, Bob was born there in the hills of sweet St. Ann Parish in the year 1945. Today, so they say, there is not a time during the day when, somewhere in the world at large, someone is not listening to a song by Bob Marley.

Still there are children, young children mostly, who do not know him. Which makes this book written with Cedella, Bob's eldest daughter, all the more important, especially to me. A few years ago when Cedella and I read from our other book The Boy From Nine Miles, she sang Three Little Birds acappella. This time, Cedella wasn't there but my younger daughter Hannah was, and she sang the song very sweetly and the whole audience joined in.

The three little birds, most probably Jamaican doves, visited Bob twice "with messages pure and true." First, the day he was born, the birds came to his windowsill. This was embraced as a sign according to Bob's maternal grandfather Omeriah who said, "I think that a new day is dawning." Later in life while visiting his old home village, Bob saw the three little birds again. They offered him fresh insight and inspiration and he wrote the song that is now one of his most popular.

Don't worry about a thing
cause every little thing gonna be all right

No wonder the song is so beloved. We need to hear those words again and again and again. Check the book, you'll like it. Our daughter Hannah sings it. Our other daughter Mariah created the pictures for the book. I am twice blessed, thrice blessed,knowing Cedella.

You take a big Miami moon and mix it with a small bat boy, a sleeping beauty, a jack sparrow with all the requisite blue eyes and long dreadlocks, a kitty cat who turns into a donkey, a tall man with a small woman grafted to his tummy, an orange-suited convict, a blonde bombshell, a net-stockinged tutu'd punk teen, a little red devil. Am I leaving anybody out? Oh, yeah, me. Add one goofball with shades. Sprinkle Miami moondust and stir with leaf of palm, and you get. . .

Oh, oh. Here come some more monsters. The hugest Frankenstein ever seen, twelve feet tall if he's an inch and right next to him is a fourteen-foot magistrate ghoul with black holes for eyes and chain mail hair cascading over his shoulders. I peek low -- the ghoul guy's on stilts and Frankie's not twelve feet tall, he's ten leagues or chains.

The whole world's on tilt. And there's hands grabbing ankles under tables and someone standing at the door with a stand-up bass playing the old TV theme of Batman as our little bat boy enters the house. There's one bluish-grayish-ickish house with a yard woven to the max with spider webbing. We found this freakhouse by following bloody tracks on the road.

Predator leaps out of an open door and a hundred kids scream muddy murther!

The whole neighborhood's laughing. The moon's got the face of Peter Lorre, and he's laughing, too. I am laughing at everything but especially at my daughter Hannah the kitty who has turned into a clipping clopping donkey. Will the man with the old lady stuck to his chest ever catch bat boy whose pumpkin is so full of goodies he has to sit down and get his breath.

I want to do this again next year. . .

We have just returned from the most wonderful school, The Chinquapin School in Highland, Texas. A student body consisting of 150 students, all of whom are on scholarship. The majority Hispanic. A smaller number African American, Caucasian and Asian. Nearly all come from economically disadvantaged homes; 85% will be college graduates. Many are the first in their family to graduate from high school and most will be the first to go to college.

Quite a number of students said thank you at the end of the class. Their manner of doing this suggested they really meant it. Listening,learning and gratitude are often missing in American schools in general. But at Chinquapin everyone was thankful. All listened.

I gave the students a tenth century Icelandic riddle that is not that easy to solve because you have to know where to look in the library. You also have to use intuition, reasoning and imagination and have a little bit of luck besides to find the source of the riddle.

Try it yourself. To solve, you must explain what the Thing is and why the ten feet and three eyes.

Who are the two who ride to the Thing?
Three eyes they have together
Ten feet and one tail.
And thus they travel through the lands.

I offered a free book to anyone who could crack the antique code of the greatest warriors, finest poets and storytellers and best shapers of early democracy rivaling any civilization you care to name in the world.

And by day's end,a 7th grade boy named Esteban had the trail to the answer, if not the key that unlocked the door in the cloud.

And the riddler, enemy of all Frost Giants, walked out the door into the sweet Texan rain.

My poet pen pal Bob Arnold asked me the other day -- "Who's minding the store?" By which he meant -- Where's the new blog? I told him there wouldn't be one until I went to the Miami Book Fair International and The Chinquaupin School in Houston, Texas. But then I started thinking. . . maybe I should just write an update on some of my earlier blogs. So that's what I'm about to do.

The first blog I did on this site is about our old friend Karl Lipsky who was 94 when I wrote about him. This year, he turned 95 and a few days after his birthday he passed. We attended his Jewish-Irish wake rather than the private birthday party we'd planned to have with him. Karl and I used to swim together in Lake Buel and when he'd forgotten how to dive off the dock, he'd bend over, hold his hands pointed together like a little kid and ask, "Is this how it's done?" Then he'd just drop into the green water and disappear. I was always afraid he wouldn't come up but he always did.



One day after our cold swim in the lake, Karl pointed to an oak tree on the shore. "When that oak tree was a sapling," he explained, "I put a chrome soap dish on the lakeside of the tree and placed a red bar of Lifeboy carbolic soap in it." That was thirty years ago when he nailed the soap dish in place and when Karl turned 94 one year ago, we went to the tree and looked for the dish. All that was left of it was a rim of rusted metal. The oak had grown into a large shade tree and the hungry bark had all but swallowed the 1960s soap dish.
Karl looked at it and laughed. "When that bit of rust is gone, I'll be gone," Karl said with a chuckle. True to his prediction, this year the rim of rust was invisible and Karl is no longer with us. I won't say he's gone -- I can't say that because he's here with me now, in spirit, soapdish notwithstanding.

From the pineflats of Florida to the canyons of New Mexico we come to share our stories and poems with ourselves -- and with the hummingbirds.

Lorry and I have been leading the Green River Writers Workshop with founder Alice Carney for the last two years, but this is the first year the hummingbirds have taken such an avid interest in it. They write on the air with their wings, humming and buzzing about effortlessly. I stand in my panama cowboy hat with the beaded Indian headband and the hummingbirds dip in under the broad white brim and sing to me of things past, present and soon to come.

Hummingbird, the Navajos say, is healer, medicine man. When you hear his little bell ringing, he's bringing medicine to all who need it. Peaceful, medicinal nectar of flowers. It's in the air, airborne, and in the song of wings moving at a furious pace. So small a creature, so tiny a healer, so great a singer of songs.

We, as writers, share in this divinity of Navajo grace.

And hummingbird music becomes our song, as we speak, write, listen, meditate, and most importantly, remember. For it is in memory that we truly become who we are: beings of light. Not creatures of darkness. But rememberers of light.

A young writer once told me she remembered far back into her earliest time on earth.

"How far?" I asked.

"All the way back to when I was born," she answered.

We can do that. Our minds honeycombed with stored memory.

What follows is a poem written by all of us -- Jane, Fran, Petey, Carol, Liz, Alice, Lorry and Gerry. . . one line each, each line about our mothers, and all of these honest lines true to memory, true to life, true to ourselves. When we finished one round, we started another until we at last came to what we thought was the final sentence.

MOTHER

my mother said she was lace and I was burlap
my mother smiled at the sight of me
my mother sailed
my mother hung this sign in her kitchen: I am sick of cooking
my mother asked john and me to bring back a jar of pickled pigs' knuckles when we returned from new mexico
my mother died at the end of a rope
my mother did not know where she ended and I began
my mother is peaceful now in a garden
my mother washed my mouth out with soap
my mother wore size 6 1/2 shoes and so do I
my mother expressed love by plumping my pillows
my mother channeled radio stations with her teeth
my mother hid her vodka in my grandmother's closet
my mother's closet smelled of cedar
my mother also walked on her tiptoes
my mother died and went to heaven
my mother made chinese dishes with canned la choy products
my mother read all of the oz books to me
my mother danced and smoked and drank and she was a mormon
my mother made me beautiful prom dresses
my mother made liver and onions and they tasted good
my mother made boiled-in-butters for me
my mother was more like my grandfather than my grandmother
my mother taught me how to sew clothes and make muffins
my mother stuck up for me
my mother made me perfect doll clothes but no clothes for me
my mother made her sister lie down on the floor so that my mom could walk up and down her spine
my mother drank vodka and read romance stories and died of a broken heart because she missed daddy
my mother made me a writer
my mother could make a perfect fried egg
my mother was born in the Philippines but she was not a filipino
my mother liked to back the car down the driveway to get her mail
my mother filled the kitchen with the smell of homemade bread
my mother smelled of perfume when she bent down to kiss me goodnight
my mother loved her children