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Actually, we’ve just returned from our annual weekend camping trip to Forked Lake Campgrounds. There’s something so comforting and yet revelatory about tradition. You go back, do the same thing every year, more or less with the same people, but each time feels unique. Familiar, yet changed in small ways. A big part of that is our children, growing up before our eyes. The kid you used to watch like a hawk is now out on the kayak, muscles rippling.

This year school year our oldest will be a senior in Geneseo. He missed the trip, already gone. The middle child, Gavin, enters 10th grade; he’ll begin the year on the JV Volleyball team — a new sport for him. Our youngest, Maggie, just 13, enters 8th grade.

They are growing up.

Here’s a fun snap taken in Long Lake, outside of Hoss’s legendary (Triple-S’s!) store. That’s Gavin in the Cape Cod sweatshirt; Maggie, standing beside him, apple in hand; I’m up above in gray (shirt and hair), fondling the bear; and Lisa, my wife, is on the other side in the light-blue tee and vest. Those other folks? No idea how they got in there.

This morning my wife, Lisa, and daughter, Maggie (13), pulled into our driveway after an energizing run. What a great way to start the day.

Lisa, alas, did not notice the cardinal that was moving awkwardly on the pavement. Or, I guess, Lisa just expected that it would fly away. Most birds do. This one did not. Splat.

Maggie said, “Mama? Did you just . . . ?”

Our daughter was upset. Well on her way to becoming a young woman, Maggie was suddenly a little girl again, traumatized, struggling to understand.

“Mama?”

The poor bird had no chance against a Toyota Camry.

In the car, there was a pause. Maggie distraught, in disbelief.

Lisa thinking, “Uh-oh.”

My wife steps out of the car to see what’s to be done, figuring it will involve a shovel and a garbage can and perhaps a few years of therapy for the aforementioned Maggie. Insurance almost certainly won’t cover it.

Suddenly a large black crow swoops down, grabs the splattered cardinal in its claws, and flies off.

Bye-bye, birdie.

Maggie catatonic now, sputtering, “Mama? Mama?”

Two minutes later, our neighbor across the street texts Lisa, asking, “What did that crow just take from your driveway? It was red. Did you just run over a bird?”

Damn, a witness!

Good morning, folks. Carry on.

Nothing to see here, nothing at all.

It was a busy weekend. Around here, that’s like saying the ocean was damp. It’s how we roll.

On Sunday, I dropped Maggie off at her AAU basketball’s coach’s house in Castleton at 9:00, because she had a 10:00 practice in Troy and I couldn’t get there, since I had to be in Schenectady to coach a travel baseball game at 10:30. It was my son Gavin’s team, but he wasn’t able to be there because he was spending the night in New Hampshire (taken by my wife, also in NH) for a Regatta. Gavin recently joined the Albany Rowing Club, you see. The college-age son, Nick, visiting for the long weekend, picked up Maggie at the end of practice and brought her out to lunch and then, finally, home.

By the time I returned, everyone was gone. Maggie to her friend’s house, Nick at some other place. I don’t believe my family is all that different from anyone’s else. We’re all running around. That’s not the point of this post anyway.

On the kitchen counter, I found this pad.

(Sorry for the sideways shot, it’s one of the kinks in the Apple dynasty, an impossible thing to solve — the ordinary photo sent from an iPhone that shows up sideways on certain blogs.)

Obviously: Maggie was home alone, grabbed some markers and the nearest pad, and wrote out the names of everyone in her family. It wasn’t a gift, it wasn’t intended for anyone. Just something she did to pass the time, the names of the folks she loved, made to look pretty.

In Book #3 of my SCARY STORIES Series — launching this summer, so don’t make any plans — and I mean that, no plans whatsoever — I featured a whole mess of crows in the story. You know, when it comes to foreshadowing and a general air of ominousness, nothing beats a murder of crows.

We have Van Gogh to thank for that, his intimations of mortality in the great painting, “Wheat Field with Crows.”

And, of course, there’s Hitchcock. This is one of my favorite scenes in the history of film, the essence of suspense, the knot slowly tightening, the shots of the crows gathering, cut to Tippi Hedren smoking her cigarette unawares, and back and forth, back and forth, until we get that great shot of Tippi watching one crow in flight across the sky until it lands on the playground. And her eyes grow large. In the background all the while, children sing an American variation of a Scottish folktale, “Risseldy, Rosseldy.” Young, innocent voices. That’s cinematic perfection right there. I’ve watched it a dozen times.

So I stuck some crows into my story, black harbingers of doom!, and even included a small tribute to a scene from “The Birds.” (Kids these days are always clamoring for more allusions to 1960’s films. It’s just the kind of thing that young readers nowadays expect to find in their chapter books.)

Crows are basically gross, for the most part. But useful as nature’s trash collectors. They eat the road kill, smashed squirrels and flattened chipmunks, and I think we can all agree that we’re grateful for that. Thanks, crows!

Quick crow story:

My wife Lisa is the best mother in the world. She’s tied, actually, with a long list of other mothers, but she’s right there at the top, tied for first place. One Easter long ago, when Gavin (13) and Maggie (12) were probably 3 and 1 1/2, Lisa woke early in the morning to set up an Easter egg hunt. We had a nice, woodsy backyard at the time. Plastic eggs? What? Is that what you’re thinking? Oh, please. No, Lisa used actual hard-boiled eggs and hid them around the lawn. Under bushes and often right there in the middle of the lawn, since at the time the kids were young and not exactly the best Scotland Yard had to offer.

Later it was time for the egg hunt. And lo, there were no eggs. Or, at least, very few to be found.

What happened to them? Where’d they go? We didn’t know. So we set out an egg in the middle of the lawn, ducked back inside, and watched by the window. Within two minutes, a big black crow landed, grabbed the egg in its talons, and flew off for a hearty breakfast.

While thinking about crows, and researching them ever-so-slightly, I came across this, which is why I began this post in the first place.

Oh, and here’s the brief excerpt from SCARY TALES, Book #3. In this scene, three students are trapped inside a school, surrounded by zombies, or ghouls, or whatever creepy thing they are out there. It’s not good. For a variety of reasons — the best one being “for dramatic purposes” — Carter decides to go for help. He needs to quietly make his way two blocks through the night fog, avoid the zombies that seems to be aimlessly milling around, find his folks, get help, and save the day.

(I know, it’s sounds kind of dumb, but it’s a lot of fun.)

Here goes . . .

Carter stepped out into the mist with supreme calm. Cool as a lake. It was foggy, but he could still see about 30 feet in any direction. He gave a thumbs-up to the worried faces that stood vigil at the door.

It’s all good.

A crow landed near his foot, cawed noisily. Then another, and another. Carter stepped cautiously, not wishing to disturb the birds. He noticed a dark figure ahead and veered away from it.

CAW-CAW! Carter looked up to see a crow dive-bombing from above, talons out. The black bird hit Carter’s head at full force, wham, and tore into his scalp.

“Ow, shoot,” Carter cursed. He staggered a step, dazed, and waited for the dizziness to pass. Carter tenderly probed the injury with his fingers. His scalp was torn. Under a loose flap of skin, his flesh felt like raw hamburger. It was wet.

He checked his fingers. Blood. Lots of it.

Oooooaaaaannnn, oooooaaaaannnn.

The moans came, louder and louder, from every direction. As if the creatures were calling to each other. Now more shapes appeared in the distance, moving toward him. “It’s the blood,” Carter thought. “They smell it.”

My daughter is a slob. Let’s get that out of the way up front. She makes messes and moves on — blithely.

Yesterday she sat at the kitchen counter with a stack of index cards, Post-It Notes, tape, a laptop, a variety of colored markers, a clunky three-ring binder, and scissors.

“What are you up to, Mags?” I asked.

She grunted, shrugged, hummed and mumbled in a barely-communicative manner. Something about decorating the cover of her notebook. Whatev.

I found the result of her efforts amidst the detritus this morning: scissors and markers and scattered paper scraps on the floor from all that cutting, cutting, cutting. Here’s the new cover of my fifth-grade daughter’s black binder:

Maggie has always left notes to herself around the house, usually in her bedroom, usually of the inspirational variety. I guess it beats photos of Justin Bieber.

I think she’s going to live an interesting life. To me, there’s a lot of stuff on here that I appreciate. But the most telling is the simplest, that smiley face in the upper right. That’s Maggie’s attitude, always has been. She’s genuinely baffled by people who aren’t happy. And in her mind, there’s nothing she can’t accomplish. Ah, youth and confidence. I hope she stays that way forever.

Crazy about her. To the point where we can live with the mess — without too much yelling.

This isn’t the sort of letter I normally share, but boy is it ever relevant to my life lately. This is the time of year when I field many inquiries about my availability for school visits.

For educators who’d like help on that, I’ve posted on the topic many times before . . .

* Quickie overview of a standard visit.

* An author’s perspective, featuring my mantra: Authors don’t do school visits; schools do author visits.

* One Book, One School: Some reflections.

The easiest thing would be to click here on the archive for “school visits” and you’ll find links to all sorts of visits, reflections, complaints, experiences. Read them all and you’ll never want to see me again. It would be like the aversion therapy in “Clockwork Orange.”

Here’s my second oldest brother, Billy with cigarette, on an early 70’s Christmas morning when he received the soundtrack to “A Clockwork Orange.” He remember being a little kid — Billy was ten years older — and listening to him tell me all about that movie. That’s my sister Barbara, left. (Don’t you just love old family photographs?)

Anyway, just in the next two months, I’m looking at trips to MA, CT, NC, SC, and FLA. And I’m in discussion with educators in MI, NJ, CO. It’s a change from my pre-hardcover life, when most of my visits were local. These far-flung visits require a lot more organization from the schools, because I can’t possibly visit a school for one day in, say, Kentucky. It just doesn’t make sense.

Here’s a letter that is somewhat typical.

Hi James -

We’re wondering if you’d be available to visit MI in March 2011.  We’ve tentatively chosen Along Came Spider as our One Book, One City for Kids title, but we’d really like to have the author visit us after the kids have finished reading it.  I think our kids would really enjoy meeting you!

We purchase a paperback copy of our OBOC for Kids title for every 4th grader in the city, hoping that that will help get the word out about how much fun reading can be.  The students start reading in January and then usually have the author visit for a couple days in March, visiting 4 schools.  We’re flexible about the dates, and have run the program from Mar

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Today is my sister Jean’s birthday. Fifty-four years on this earth. So I dug out this old photo from a family trip, D.C. I think, perhaps Virginia. I seem to recall us heading down there to visit my brother John. Of the seven children, Jean was #6 and I was #7, so toward the end, as the elders fled, it was us.

I’d bet that I’m 13 in this shot, making this 1974, guessing.

-

Don’t you love my retro kicks?

If you are like me, you can’t get enough of shots from this period, Nixon to Ford to Carter.

The glorious ’70s. The story of innocence lost.

Gavin got an iPod Touch for his twelfth birthday. He just downloaded a new app. It’s brought the whole family together. Let’s hear it for technology. Come on, everyone, repeat after us: “BRAAAINS!”

We think Mom has been working too hard. And Daisy the Zombie Dog . . . looks hungry.

It’s how Maggie, my 10-year-old daughter, answers certain types of questions these days.

For example, “Maggie, are you feeling better now that you’ve rested?”

“-ish,” she answers. As in, better-ish. Kind of, sort of, a little, not really.

Or perhaps it’s spelled “Ish.” Hard to tell, though I prefer the hyphenated, lower case version. The questions that elicit this response tend to be qualitative in nature. But the range seems to be widening, with “-ish” covering more ground. Not dissimilar to, say, meh.

“How do you like that coffee ice cream?”

“-ish,” she’ll reply from the back seat, licking away without any great enthusiasm, waffling on the waffle cone.

No character in my books has used “-ish” in dialogue. But I suspect that’s going to change.

Maggie is amazing. She’s in the summer of her life, between 4th and 5th grade, healthy, strong, happy, popular.

She’s my third child, after two boys, so there’s always a degree of otherness to Maggie. She’s from the other side, across the tracks, an exotic creature, a girl. I don’t and can’t relate to her in the same way as I do with her brothers. With Nick and Gavin, I can sometimes crawl into their skin and say, “I know exactly how they feel. I’ve been exactly there.” But with Maggie, there’s always a little leap, even if it’s only a synaptic gap.

Which is why I’ve always identified with this page from Charlotte Zolotow:

Lisa overheard our daughter talking with her friend, Jenna. They’d been going to basketball camp together, arranging play dates, sleep-overs. Entwined. And as they were parting, Jenna called out, “I love you, Maggie!”

Maggie answered, “I love you, too!”

It was natural, relaxed, immediate, real. I mean, there was nothing phony about it. Nothing premeditated. That’s how they feel about each other and, so, they said so.

How nice.

This has never happened with my boys. No judgment, I’m just saying. If Gavin or Nick loved one of his friends (which is entirely possible, even probable), 1) I don’t think he’d say so, and; 2) I’m not sure he’d know it exactly in that way or in those words. Wired differently, I guess.

I’ll have to think about this one some more. Is it harder for a boy to tell another boy that he loves him? As men, is that something we lack? I love you, dude. Right back atcha, bro.

Thoughts, comments?

Quick story from this morning:

Nick has already gone to school. Lisa, off to work. Maggie still asleep upstairs. And it’s almost time to get Gavin, my middle schooler, out the door. Not a problem usually, as he’s pathologically punctual, like his father.

I walk into the mud room by the side door, where we hang coats and backpacks and shelve our shoes (in theory!). Clang, bang, clang! Gavin is slamming together the soles of his Reeboks, mud flying everywhere in caked clumps.

To be clear: He is inside the house as he does this. And my son is doing it out of the goodness of his dutiful heart, since we’ve recently disparaged the trail of mud inside the house, through the halls, into the kitchen, across the rug. Yesterday I went so far as to hand my put-upon son a broom and dustpan, compelled him to sweep and other hideous punishments.

So watching him bang the sneakers together, I recognize it as some form of progess.

“Gavin, you do that outside,” I said. Maybe with a little something in my voice that conveys a hint of, just possibly, frustration.

“But Dad, it’s the mud room,” he replied.

I let that sink in for a moment, admire the logic of it. The mud room. Maybe not the best name in the world. In Gavin’s mind, a room dedicated to the accumulation of mud. There should be mud, in fact. And, in fact, he was doing a swell thing. Helping the cause! A good boy.

“Yeah, but,” I replied, gently, “let’s try to keep it outside. Okay? Bang the sneakers outside.”

So he instantly steps into the wet driveway in his white socks and starts to whack away. I almost talk about the wet ground and the white socks and how maybe that’s not the best combination in the world. How it’s possible to stand just inside and kind of lean out the door when whacking said sneakers. But decide against it.

We’re moving in the right direction, one soggy step at a time.