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

I've been on the road again. This time to the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

Half my life was spent under the Berkshire pines of Lake Buel. We have a little cabin on top of a piney wood hill there. My father built it, my brother rebuilt it, and now I'm fixing it up. Not much larger than Henry's cabin at Walden Pond outside of Concord. Maybe that's why my wife Lorry and I wrote A Mind with Wings: The Story of Henry David Thoreau. Cabin kinship.

Well, I am calling this piece "lost and found" because whenever I travel somewhere to give a talk or tell stories, I start out feeling lost. Travel does that to me. To most of us, I think. You're at swim in the big sea wishing somehow that you were back in your little pond. That sense of lostness lasts only as long as you want it to. For me, it goes away as soon as I am "home."

Home is where the heart is. But where is the heart? It's all over the place when we travel. I was with my cousin Kyle one day and we went to the old Monterey Dump and I looked at the neat landfill with its bins and receptacles, and my mind was lost.

Lost in memory. Twenty-five years ago the Lord of the Landfill was Mr. Kisselbrock and his faithful Dump Dog. I looked forward to seeing them whenever I went dumpwards. But twenty-five years before that, the dump had no attendant. It was just a huge empty space full of garbage. We went there at night with our twenty-two rifles and hunted rats. Sometimes I believe the rats hunted us. They were large enough and red-eyed and they could sneak up behind you and run up your pant leg. Or so I seem to remember thinking when I was twelve.

This lost and found moment came to me at the Monterey Dump. I felt right at home with my memories. Inside the shed where giveaway books were shelved and cast-off clothes were hangered, I felt home again -- I picked up a book. Crow Killer by Dr. Robert Bunker. In the 1970s it was made into the film Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford.

The character of the novel and film was mountain man Liver-Eating Johnson. He got that name, the story goes, after a Crow raiding party killed his wife and child. From that point on, Johnson turned madman. Declaring a personal war on the Crow nation, he tracked and killed one warrior after another. He was lost to himself and his heart was home to a devil named Revenge.

The story of Crow Killer is at least partly true. Bunker's writing authenticated it for me in 1967 when I read the book in a hospital bed after being run over by a motorcyclist with no headlight. This hit-and-run accident took me years to overcome, mentally and physically.

For a long while I was on one leg. My own lostness was so vast I couldn't see across it. I had to find the faith in myself that enabled me to be a writer like Dr. Bunker. I wrote him. And he actually phoned me when I was in the hospital. Then he sent his daughter Susan to visit me and she brought a personal signed copy of her father's book to my bedside.

I'll never forget him, her, the book, Johnson, or what it felt like to be lost in the vagaries of vengeance. Took me years to learn how to walk (I still have a slight limp and wear my shoes unevenly). Took me longer to forgive the drunken man who'd nearly killed me.

All these things flickered through my mind as I glanced at the old, dilapidated paperback of Crow Killer.

I looked up from my revery and there,tacked on the wall of the dump shed was this --

For my
mom she pass
away last Tuesday
if anybody want
to go serve it is
Otis Church big white
one 6:00 Thursday
If anybody want to donate come see
me it will help.

This note of lost-and-foundness touched me deeply. The writing of it, just the words themselves, crying out for help, were a kind of prayer encapsuled in hope.

I wanted to serve, in my way, so I am posting the heartfelt plea here. There's a message for all of us. More than one. You don't know what you lose until you lose it. You don't know your friends until you're down and out. I found that out when I was in the hospital. There was a prayer circle of Navajos sitting in chairs when I opened my eyes after my operation. After 40 years I am still writing to them. More than anything else, they cleared my mind of any violent action in my heart.

Home is where the heart is.

But you can be at home, anywhere, if your heart's at ease.

As we drove back to the little cabin on the ridge, I thought about how connected I was to the pine-needle place in the hills of western Massachusetts. How I'd seen Norman Rockwell often when I was a boy. How my grandfather knew W.E.B. Du Bois. How Hal Borland, just down the road in the 60s, helped me write about American Indians. How all of these people, and so many more made me feel connected to this Berkshire place that is never lost and ever found.

Coming home to Lake Buel, I was greeted by my cousin's cat Oscar.

Oscar was lost on the Lake Buel Boat Ramp.

And found by my cousin Kyle.

Oscar the Grouch lives not in a garbage can but a nice box where he can look out at the world and know that his heart is home.