Well.

It was the word under my high school yearbook picture. Well. Because apparently that’s what people remembered me saying a lot. So much so, in fact, that “well” must have become universally recognized as my calling card. I objected to a yearbook writer by saying, “Well, how could you write that? Isn’t there something else about me? Well, isn’t there?”

The editor said, “Not now, Bobby.”

I’m at the tail end of a barnstorming tour of Ohio, having taken in Cleveland, Hudson, Delaware, and Wooster, zigzagging across the state, visiting as many as three cities a day. Gosh, if I only played baseball in 1936. The ostensible purpose of my “tour,” as opposed to a one- or two-day school visit, was to talk about the new book, the one that revolves around a family living in Cleveland. In practice, however, the book didn’t get all that much play because the presentations I did were attended by mostly younger children. I snuck in as much as I could say about it before launching into a survey of my more popular younger writing.

Uh . . . what else? There is now a classroom guide to the book, written by Cliff Wohl. Soon, I’ll be back home, where it looks like we’ll be taking in a second dog as soon as Monday. The book has my initials blind-stamped on the hardcover, the first time that has ever happened. You can’t help but run your thumb over the stamping. I am as proud of that as of anything. Our old, ailing apple tree finally went down in the recent snowstorm. Greg Call painted a lovely cover; someone thought they recognized the bus station, but it’s not a bus station in Ohio, it’s in Atlanta. It’s clear here in Wooster and warm, a day before the outstanding Buckeye Book Fair that takes place all day tomorrow. Hudson Library and Historical Society, where I was last night, has, not that I was able to view it on this trip, an outstanding collection of material relating to John Brown; Brown lived in Hudson from the time he was five to his sixteenth year, when he moved to Massachusetts, then Connecticut, to study for the ministry. I’m deeply happy that I wrote the story and on Wednesday happened to meet a middle school student in Delaware, who presented a school report on it. Houses on either side of my home in Cleveland are empty blank little boxes.