Today is for Ryan

Today is the birthday of my nephew, Ryan. Ryan is nine-years old. He's a good guy. His dog, Dylan, thinks so, and so does his Aunt Sheri. Aunt Sheri is taller than Ryan. So is the dog Dylan. Dylan is a Great Dane like Scooby Doo. He is also as brave as Scooby Doo, which is to say he is not very brave. Ryan's other dog is Jordan, who is smaller and older and mostly deaf, though sometimes Jordan seems to be faking being deaf to get out of having to do things around the house. Like, when Ryan's mom tells Jordan to help her out by vacuuming the living room, Jordan pretends to be deaf so he can keep watching Jimmy Neutron. When you get old, you get smart in these ways.

Ryan is getting smarter every day. He reads a lot, and he likes reading. He spells very well and nose that correkt speling madders. He studies Tae Kwan Do and is becoming a super hero. You can tell from the picture that he is a super hero, a force for good. In the picture, he is the one without the skull face. Ryan is better looking than the skull-faced man, but so is Dylan the Great Dane. Ryan is a super hero and also a guitar hero, but not as much a guitar hero as his Dad who can beat Slash. Rock on, Dad!

Because Ryan is my favorite nephew, I thought the world should know about him, so I put this up on the Internet. Now, Ryan is no longer a secret. Everyone knows.

The Heart behind "The Heartless Stone": April 16, 6:30 p.m.

A few months back I received an e-mail with the subject line "hello michael" that began "There is no way in hell you would ever remember this ..."

You might expect an e-mail beginning that way to contain a blackmail threat. This one didn't. Instead, it took me back to a winter evening in Tucson, Arizona twenty-something years ago and a high school basketball game (I imagine Bubba Martin was playing; a helluva guard). At the time I was an aspiring sports reporter, a little older than Tom Zoellner who was also an aspiring sports reporter. The newspaper where I worked had assigned us to the same game so I could show Tom the basics.

All this time later, Tom had found me via an entry on the books page of NewWest.net and thought he'd give me a hello.

Turns out we'd both gone on to newspaper reporting careers and then took up writing. We'd even both lived a while in Missoula, Montana, Now he was in New York City; I'm in Baltimore.

Moreover, he's done great work. His 2006 book ""The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desire", won plaudits from reviewers around the country. I'm in the midst of it, stunned by the reporting and writing. It's a compelling book that Zoellner reported from ten countries including three in Africa. That same year "An Ordinary Man," was released, which is the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, the heroic hotel manager depicted in Hotel Rwanda, a book co-authored by Zoellner.

Wednesday, April 16, Tom will read from "The Heartless Stone" here in Baltimore at Towson University as part of our English Department Reading Series. The first page turns around 6:30 p.m., in the Towson Room of the Cook Library. I'm thrilled to see Tom again and eager to hear him read. We have no plans to cover any high school sports.

Bookish Baltimore: April 19, 1 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Such a Saturday! April 19 in this, the Cruelest Month, there's a little kindness -- and it's free!

The fun begins early at the dowtown branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library with City Lit Festival V. I'm sure to be there at 1 p.m. for the panel featuring Dan Fesperman, Laura Lippman and Manil Suri.

The last time I attended a 510 reading at the Minas Gallery, I feared the second-story floorboards would give way, there was such a crowd. Maybe we'll get lucky and bring down the building on April 19, when I'll be reading alongside novelists Maud Casey and Michael Kimball (think of them as the heavyweights; I'm the undercard).

The 510 Readings start at 5 p.m., 815 W. 36th Street in Baltimore. I'll read a short story that first appeared in the Missouri Review's summer 2006 issue, featured to the right.

I'll order oysters and cancel the ersters ...

I haven’t blogged for a while now since the wyf moved back to Baltimore. Not that I’m blaming her. I’m not blaming her. But the classes I’m teaching this semester have kept me busy, and the wyf and I have had some excitement to deal with, which excitement is known to the general public as Ikea.

Ikea. I-K-E-A. That is correct.

And with that transition we come to The Baltimore Bee, a spelling adventure for kids grades 3-to-8, cosponsored by my employer, Towson University, along with a tutoring program called Educate Online and the charitable foundation set up by a player with the Baltimore Ravens named Daniel Wilcox.

I volunteered to be a judge, not knowing what that would mean. I figured I’d listen to words spelled and say “yes, correct,” or “no, incorrect.” Turns out I was going to pronounce words. As the wyf will tell you, I don’t always pronounce words correctly. In childhood I read the word “invalid” and thought it was pronounced “in VAL id” as in “not valid.” My tongue has been tied ever since. So imagine my terror when asked to pronounce words for a spelling bee. I know how these things go. Volunteers do the work, irate parents do the complaining. I prepared for the worst.

And indeed, I apparently screwed up. Mispronounced chutney. Mine was not quite Chooo-tney but not ch-uh-tney either. Something in-between. The innocent left to spell the word took the two Os option. A player with the Baltimore Ravens rang a bell that meant “wrong” and said, “That spelling is incorrect.”

A teacher challenged my mistake during our lunch break, but too late for the kid. The rules say mispronunciations must be challenged before the next round begins.

Every time I woke up the night following the Bee, I thought of chutney. The dog kicks its legs, I awake, and I think: chutney. The wyf tells me I snore, I think: chutney. Some kids stop their car at 2:30 a.m. on the street outside so a girl can get out of the backseat and puke on the pavement, I think chutney.

Imagine how this would go over in Stalin’s Russia. You mispronounce chutney at the Spelling Bee and Little Josef misses the word and suddenly you, Comrade Pronouncer, are off to the Gulag. In Baltimore, the kid might be the son of an Avon Barksdale type from “The Wire” fame. The next day some guys in black SUVs park in front of the house. Some nice pictures of you end up in a file folder at the homicide division of Baltimore's finest.

More likely, I just created a reason for the kid to never like Towson University. He’ll grow up to attend Frostburg State because Towson is careless enough to hire English professors who can’t pronounce chutney.

This sort of thing creates a powerful memory in a boy. My pinewood racer was leading the Cub Scout derby until it hit a seam in the track and bounced off course. No car racing in that lane won the pinewood derby that night at my elementary school in Glastonbury, Connecticut. No, the scout leaders told me, we couldn’t redo the race. No, we couldn’t take into account the bad lane. Go, little Cub Scout, and follow the law of the pack.

Which law says: sometimes you get the guy who mispronounces chutney.

And he apologizes.

Baltimore writers Michael Kimball and Jen Michalski have put together a reading series in the city called 5ive:ten readings. The series is dedicated solely to fiction (a novel idea, pardon the pun). Out of town, I missed the first episode, but I plan to make the rest, every third Saturday of the month at 5 p.m. in the Minas Gallery, 815 W. 36th Street. I'm fortunate to be reading in the series on April 19, joining all-stars Michael Kimball and Maud Casey. All evenings are supposed to last about an hour, so you'll get quick bites of fiction ... No recitations of War And Peace here.

If you're in Charm City, check out the series. And if you're in D.C. or Philly or points between, make the drive.