A teen reader in Italy who is writing a report on my wife Loretta asked us for a complete biography. Loretta, or Lorry as most of us know her, wrote to her devoted reader saying that her biography and her husband's had sort of intertwined over the past 40 years of marriage, but she resurrected some family facts of her own and sent them off in an email. The teen reader wrote back her appreciation and said Loretta is a famous poet.

Loretta (and Gerald) take any and all felicitations, thank you, thank you. BUT, as Lorry just said to me, "I have never written a poem in my life!"

I reminded her that we have three current editions of one of our books (The Mythology of Dogs) in Italian, and that maybe the reader was a little confused. I also reminded her that I had a reader once who stated that I was a German citizen and worked for the German government and another reader who insisted that I was an American Indian high school teacher living in Orlando, Florida. In fact, I have a Hungarian-English background and we live in Bokeelia, Florida.

Readers -- and people in general -- get the funniest ideas about writers. I once had a conversation with a pizza delivery man that went like this --

Pizza Guy: What do you do for a living?
Me: I'm a writer.
Pizza Guy: Published?

For the record, and for Loretta's admirers, here are some interesting facts. Loretta's family came from North Carolina, traveled from there to Texas, and then settled in northern New Mexico in the 1880s. They lived in an earthen house called a dugout, basically a cave. This was in Questa, New Mexico where they eventually built a ranch house and raised cattle. When they sold their ranch the ownership passed to Mabel Dodge Lujan and she gave the house and property to D.H. Lawrence in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Members of Loretta's family traveled to the Farmington area where the town of Chambers was, and still is, named after them. Emma Chambers, Loretta's great great aunt remembered traveling from Texas to California in a conestoga wagon and meeting friendly Indians along the way.

By the way, although Loretta has never written a poem, she should. Her family history is an unwritten poem. And she -- all by herself -- is a celebrated line of verse.

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.