Traveling with my cat I found him behind my neighbor's garage.

They were both retired and about to move to Florida, and they would rather sell most of their belongings than spend the money to ship them south.

I was eleven years old, and I was looking for a Tarzan book, or Clarence Mulford's "The Adventures of Hopper Dragon Cassidy", or maybe a Mickey Mouse book.

．

Spillane's restricted novel.

I found them all, but then I had to face the harsh reality.

They were fifty cents apiece (Give Me a Kiss was even a full dollar), and I only had a nickel.

So I kept looking around and finally found the only book I could afford.

It's called Travels with My Cat, and the author is Miss Priscilla Wallace.

Not Priscilla, but Miss Priscilla.

For many years I thought MISS was her last name.

I flipped through the pages, expecting to find at least a few photos of half-naked Aboriginal girls hidden within.

There are no pictures at all in the book, it's all text.

I wasn't surprised; I had somehow expected that an author named Mies would not post naked women in her books.

I thought the book itself was too flashy and too feminine for a boy training for Little League—the lettering on the cover raised off the surface, and the front page was elegantly smooth, tawny, and slippery.

Silky cloth wraps the cover, and it even comes with a bookmark tied with a smooth ribbon.

Just when I was about to put it back, it opened to the page that read: Volume 121 of a limited edition of 200 copies.

This makes me look at it differently.

For just a nickel I could own a true limited edition book - how could I say no?

I walked to the garage with it, dutifully handed over my nickels, and waited for my mother to finish picking (she always picked, but never bought—buying meant spending money, and

She and my father never paid for something that could be rented cheaper or, even more cost-effectively, borrowed for free).

That night I faced a big decision.

I didn’t want to read a book called Travels with My Cat by a woman named Mies, but I spent my last nickel on it — well, at least until I got the next one

weeks of pocket money ago—and I've read my other books so many times that you can almost find the mark of my eye on them.

So I reluctantly picked it up and read the first page, then the second - and suddenly I felt transported to colonial Kenya, Siam (the old name of Thailand) and the Amazon.

Miss Priscilla Wallace's descriptions of things made me feel like I was there, and when I finished reading a chapter, I felt as if I had actually been there.

They were cities I had never heard of. The names of the cities were full of exotic sentiments, such as Maracaibo and Samarkand (a city in eastern Uzbekistan, the Soviet Union) and Addis Ababa (the capital of Ethiopia).

Some names like Constantinople (the port city of Istanbul in northwestern Turkey) I can't even find on the map.

Her father had been an explorer, long ago when explorers still existed.

She had been with him on her first few trips abroad, and he undoubtedly introduced her to the customs and customs of those distant lands.

(My own father was a typesetter. How I envied her!) I half expected the chapter on Africa to be full of rambunctious elephants and man-eating lions, and maybe Africa is—but that’s not her

Africa as seen.

Africa may have blood-red fangs and claws, but to her it reflected the golden morning light, and even the dark, shadowy places were full of wonder, but not terror.

She can find beauty anywhere.

She describes two hundred flower sellers lining the banks of the Seine in Paris on a Sunday morning, or a single fragile flower blooming in the Gobi Desert, and somehow you know they are as stunning as she describes them.

Suddenly, the buzzing alarm clock woke me up.

This was the first time I stayed up all night.

I put the book aside, got dressed, headed to school, and hurried home after school so I could read it as quickly as possible.

I read it no less than six or seven times during that year.

I can even recite some passages verbatim.

I fell in love with those faraway foreign places, and maybe a little bit in love with the author.

I even wrote her a superstitious letter, addressed to: "Priscilla Mies somewhere," and of course it was returned.

Next, in the fall, I fell in love with novels by Robert A. Hine and Louis L'Aim, and a friend of mine saw Travels with My Cat and was drawn to it for its feminine cover and the fact that it was written by a woman

It made me laugh, so I put it on my bookshelf, and for the next few years, I forgot about it.

I had never seen the places she described that were filled with wonder and mystery.

There are many things I have never done.

I never stood out.

I was never rich or famous.

I have never been married.