How I Paid for College by Marc Acito

I was talking to Walter (the Giant Storyteller) Mayes at the Otter Dinner a few weeks ago, and for some reason he mentioned his Facebook profile. I remarked that I was also on Facebook. Walter practically hopped up and down. "Friend me! Friend me! Friend me!"

As in real life, I am a bit shy when it comes to "friending" on Facebook (I fear rejection, but even more, silent ridicule). However, with such an exuberant directive from Walter, I immediately looked him up and friended him the next time I was online.

Once we were friends, the first thing I did, naturally, was see who Walter's friends were. It wasn't a huge list, and I recognized many names and faces from our little universe of children's literature: publishers, writers, illustrators. Then I noticed someone named Marc Acito. Hey!

At that very moment, disk three of How I Paid for College by Marc Acito was sitting in my car's CD player. Out of all the BILLIONS of books in the world, I was listening to one by a Facebook friend of Walter's-- and it wasn't even a children's book, nor does Marc Acito live in California (which begs the question of how the two even know each other...). But think about it-- the odds are staggering! That was a library audiobook, for pete's sake!

OK, maybe this is just a really tiny little coincidence. But I don't know why, but these things floor me every time they happen to me. They're so fun and silly, they make me happy for weeks.

[By the way, I never did finish the book. I abandoned it somewhere on disk four and returned it to the library yesterday. Today I got an email from a librarian asking very kindly if I still had disk four, since it wasn't in the case. Gah! Anyway, the book wasn't bad, it just wasn't my thing. I couldn't really relate, and it was all a little too mad-cap for me. I hope Walter, or any of his friends, don't hold it against me.]

How I Paid for College by Marc Acito