Journey, Destination, Mystery, Discovery

There she is, ten-year-old Mikey Wallace thought, same as ever.

Mikey and his pal, Irving, had passed it every day they went to school for the past three years. They couldn't avoid it, even if they wanted to. There was something darkly enticing about it. Scary, but exciting.

Today the sun shone bright. Maybe he could get a better look before the witchy neighbor drove him away. But how?

For once, luck was with him. A sudden gust of wind grabbed his stocking cap and blew it up in the yard. He galloped after it.

"Whatcha doing?" Irving shouted in a whisper. "You know you're going to get into trouble."

"Knock it off, willya? I'm just chasing my cap?"

"Like fun. That mean ol' lady's gonna catch you again for sure."

"Baloney," Mikey said, but just to be sure he took a quick look at the porch in the house next door. Whoever the witch was, she would show up there. She always seemed to.

Eb got dropped into our lives one day when Evie and I visited a neighbor woman. When we got to her house we found a little black cockapoo cowering on her front porch.

"You want him?" the neighbor asked. "I can't take care of him any more. If you don't, I'm taking him to the humane society."

Her children's tearful pleas to keep him fell on deaf ears. "What's his name," I asked as I knelt next to him and rubbed his ears.

"I just call him puppy."

"Hi, Puppy."

Puppy responded by jumping on my chest and trying to slobber me to death. "What do you think?" I asked, looking up at Evie.

"No. We have a cat, and that's all the pets I want."

First of all, don't get me wrong. I'm not going to come out with a revolutionary new way to teach Johnny to read. Phonics, word recognition and holistic reading can't be beat. But there is one aspect that never has been touched, and that is, the book itself.

Adults who love to read know that it isn't just the words in the book that bring pleasure. There is a physical dynamic involved. Newsprint pages have a clean crisp smell. The pages have a feel, some rough, some as smooth as a baby's--anyway, you know the cliche. When you open a book and read, you're instantly transported to where you left off. Your imagination provides all the necessary steps, and, blast it all, it's great fun.

The trip to the theatre to see "Woman in Black" and our stay in the one-star accommodation turned out to be fine. The play was really creepy and enjoyable, The hotel room was also creepy but we were too tired from our twenty-seven hours without sleep to worry about the groaning stairway and the musty odors.

The next morning we had the breakfast provided with the bed: OJ, instant coffee, toast and marmalade, and dry cereal and milk. My daughter and I took a walk looking for a place to get a real cup of coffee and she discovered a pair of jeans to die for in a church gift shop window. It was priced at six pounds and she said they were easily worth two hundred dollars. Unfortunately they didn't fit her. I didn't think of it at the time, but she should have bought them anyway to sell on eBay. I was certain she could have made a nice profit on them to help pay for the trip.

I'm Fine, thank you. Kefinte?

So nice to return from the Mediterranean to nearly three inches of wet snow in Minneapolis. My computer would not allow me to send messages from Malta,so what I intended as a journal turned into a short series of articles.

This year's trip began back in November when I discovered a really incredible fare from Minneapolis to Malta--about half of what we usually had to pay--on line. I had intended to make another trip to promote my novel, The Cellini Masterpiece, that is set in Malta. I quickly signed up my wife and me. Our 29-year-old daughter, thinking that this might be the last time we could all take a trip together--we're both getting so old, you know--decided she wanted to come with us. Making the cheap fare doubly nice, we had also won a week stay in a four-star hotel in Malta by listening to a time-share sales pitch. (We didn't buy, but they honored their pledge). In March, the weather in Malta is nice and the tourists haven't yet arrived in droves. Actually, as you will see, March wasn't such a great idea this year.