A note from Grandpa Lou: My name is Lou Burks. I am 68 years old and I have five grandchildren, and for about eleven years now I have been making up stories at bedtime because the books on the shelf ran out and the kids wanted "one more." My daughter Angela finally sat me down at her kitchen table this summer with a tape recorder and made me tell them slow, so she could type them up on her computer. She said, "Pop, if you don't write these down they'll be gone." So here they are. They are not fancy. They are the kind of stories you tell in a dark room with one hand on a little back, and they end quiet on purpose.

If you read these to a child of yours, you are welcome. Change the names if you like. My grandchildren always did.

A note from Angela (the typist): I typed these exactly as Dad told them, only fixing the spots where he stopped to answer a question from the audience. He tells them a little different every time, so this is one version of each. The kids have argued with me already about details. Dad says the version you tell is the right one. — Angela

Tobias was a turtle, and Tobias was late. He was late to everything. He was late to breakfast, he was late to lunch, and by the time he got to dinner it was usually breakfast again.

It was not that Tobias was lazy. Tobias walked as fast as a turtle can walk, which, if you have ever watched one, is about as fast as a shadow moves across the kitchen floor. He tried. He just had short legs and a heavy house on his back, and the world was very wide.

One summer morning the frogs at the pond sent word: "Picnic tonight! On the flat rock by the lily pads! Everybody come!" Tobias heard about it from a dragonfly at about nine o'clock in the morning, and he said, "I will be there," and he started walking right then, because he knew.

He walked all through the morning. The grass was tall and every blade had to be pushed aside. He walked through the noon, when the sun was hot on his shell and he stopped in the shade of a dandelion to catch his breath. He walked through the afternoon, past the ants, who were hurrying, and past a snail, who said, "Slow down, you'll hurt yourself."

The sun went orange, then pink, then it went away. Tobias kept walking. He could hear the picnic now, far off, the frogs singing and the crickets keeping time. Then he heard the singing get thinner, and thinner, and then it stopped.

When Tobias finally climbed up on the flat rock, it was empty. A few crumbs of cattail bread. One tired firefly sitting on a pebble.

Tobias sat down and he felt his eyes get hot. "I missed it," he said. "I am always late. I miss everything."

The firefly blinked. "Missed what?" he said.

"The picnic. The singing. Everybody."

"Oh, that," said the firefly. "That was the loud part. Now look up."

Tobias looked up. And because everybody had gone home, and nobody was splashing, the pond had gone flat and still as a mirror, and the whole sky was lying in it. Every star. The moon was floating right there next to a lily pad. And out of the reeds came the fireflies, hundreds of them, who never come to the loud part, and they hung over the water so there were stars above and stars below and stars in between.

"We do this every night," the firefly said. "After. Nobody stays for it. They're always in a hurry to get home."

Tobias sat on the rock for a long, long time. He was not late. For once in his life he was exactly on time, and he was the only one who was.

And when he walked home, slowly, under all those stars, he was not sorry about anything at all.

The end. Close your eyes.

Pip was the smallest mouse in the barn, and she was afraid of a great many things. The owl. The wind when it made the barn door bang. Most of all, Boots, the old gray cat who slept in the sunny spot by the tractor and who, everybody said, was only pretending to sleep.

Pip had a little brother named Nib, who was even smaller, and Nib had one thing in the world that he loved: a shiny brass button that had fallen off the farmer's coat. He slept with it. He would not go to sleep without it. It was, to Nib, the moon.

One evening Nib came crying into the nest. "I lost it. I was rolling it and it rolled and rolled and it went under the sunny spot. Under Boots."

Pip's whiskers went cold. Their mother said, "We will get you another button," but Nib cried and cried, because there is no such thing as another button when it is the one button.

Now, Pip did not decide to be brave. Nobody decides that. What happened was, she lay in the dark listening to her little brother sniffle, and at some point her feet were already moving.

She crept along the wall where the shadows were thickest. The barn at night is full of sounds, boards creaking, a cow sighing, a moth bumping the lantern. Every one of them was Boots, in her mind, until it wasn't.

Then she was there. The sunny spot was not sunny at night, but Boots was in it all the same, a big gray hill going up and down, up and down. And right by his front paw, catching a little bit of moonlight from the high window, was the button.

Pip's heart was going so fast she thought it would wake him by itself. She said to herself, very quietly, "I am scared. All right. I am scared, and I am going anyway." And she found that you can be both of those things at once. Nobody had ever told her that.

She took three steps. Four. She reached out. Her paw closed on the button. It was warm from the cat.

Boots opened one eye.

Pip froze. The eye looked at her. She looked at the eye. It was a very long second.

Then Boots yawned, enormous, all teeth and pink, and said in a sleepy rumble, "Is that the button? He's been crying about that button for an hour. Take it. Go on. Some of us are trying to sleep."

And the eye closed.

Pip ran all the way home. She put the button in Nib's paws, and Nib stopped crying in the middle of a sob and fell asleep with his mouth open.

Her mother said, "You went past the cat?"

"I was scared the whole time," Pip said.

"That's the only kind of brave there is," her mother said, and she tucked the straw up around them both.

The end. Close your eyes.

High up over a green valley there lived a small white cloud, and the small white cloud was not happy.

"Look at me," the cloud said. "I am here, and then the wind comes, and I am over there. I change my shape every minute. In the morning I look like a rabbit and by lunch I look like a shoe. Nobody knows my name. Nobody can even find me twice."

Down below stood the mountain. The mountain had been there so long that trees grew on its shoulders and a river ran down its side like a silver ribbon, and people in the valley set their clocks by the shadow it made.

"I want to be like the mountain," the cloud said. "I want to be big and still and have a name. I want to stay."

The cloud drifted down until it was resting right on the mountain's peak, like a hat. "Mountain," it said. "How do I become like you?"

The mountain's voice was slow, the way a voice is when it comes from very far down. "Little cloud," it said, "do you know what I dream about, when I dream?"

"No."

"I dream about moving. I have stood in this one spot for longer than there have been words. I have watched you go by a thousand thousand times, over the sea, over the cities, to places I will never see. You have been to the ocean. I have only heard about it from the river."

The cloud was quiet for a while.

"So you would trade with me?"

"In a heartbeat. But nobody gets to trade. So here is what I know instead." And the mountain told the cloud a secret. "Every time you rain on me, you become part of me. Your rain goes down into my rocks and comes out again as the river. And every winter, when you snow on my head, you sit on top of me as a white cap until spring, and the people in the valley look up and say, 'Look at the mountain.' And they are looking at you."

"And then," said the mountain, "in the spring, my snow melts and goes down the river, and the sun pulls it up, and it goes back up into the sky, and it becomes a cloud again. That cloud is me. I have been to the ocean after all. I just go a little at a time."

The small white cloud thought about that for a long while. Then it did the only thing it knew how to do. It rained, softly, all over the mountain's shoulders, and the trees drank, and the river got a little louder.

"Thank you," said the mountain.

"Thank you," said the cloud, which was smaller now, and lighter, and let the wind take it wherever it was going next, and did not mind.

The end. Close your eyes.

In a house on a street very much like this one, in a drawer very much like yours, there lived two socks. They were blue with green stripes, and they were twins, and they had never been apart for one single day.

Then came laundry day.

Into the basket, into the washer, round and round in the soapy water, and into the dryer, where it is warm and dark and everything tumbles. And when the dryer door opened and the socks came out in a big fluffy pile, there was only one blue sock with green stripes.

"Where is my brother?" said the sock. Nobody answered. Socks are very quiet, and people are not good at listening to them.

The sock got put in the drawer, alone, next to a pair of dress socks who were no help at all. And that night, when the house was asleep, the sock climbed out of the drawer and went looking.

It went to the laundry basket first. It found a washcloth and a tee shirt, but no brother. It went to the washing machine and peered down into the dark drum, and its own voice came back to it, "Hello? Hello?" It went to the dryer, and it crawled all the way to the back, into the warm corner where the fuzz collects, and it found three pennies, a hair ribbon, and a very small toy car. It did not find its brother.

The sock sat down on the cold laundry room floor and felt as flat as a sock can feel.

"Psst," said a voice. It was the toy car. "You looking for a sock? Blue, green stripes?"

"Yes!"

"Under the bed. Everything ends up under the bed. Trust me. I was under the bed for a year."

So the sock went upstairs, one step at a time, which takes a sock a long while. It went into the little bedroom where a little boy was sleeping, and it flattened itself out and slid under the bed.

It was dark under there, and dusty, and there were things. A book. A single mitten. A puzzle piece that a whole family had looked for last Christmas. And there, way at the back, curled up and snoring a tiny sock snore, was a blue sock with green stripes.

"Where have you BEEN?" said the sock.

"I fell out of the basket," said his brother, yawning. "Then I got kicked. Then I got comfortable."

Together they climbed up the blanket that hung down over the side of the bed, up and up, and they curled up right next to the little boy's feet, which is where socks feel best anyway.

And in the morning, when the little boy's mother said, "Well, look at that, I found the other sock," the two socks just looked at each other and didn't say a thing.

Socks are very quiet.

The end. Close your eyes.

On the corner of a quiet street stood a streetlight, tall and thin, with a round glass head. All day long he watched the children walk to school and the dogs sniff his foot, and he was perfectly happy.

But the streetlight had a secret, and it was a strange one for a streetlight to have. He was afraid of the dark.

Every evening, when the sky went from blue to gray to purple, the streetlight would begin to shiver. He could feel the dark coming up the street like water coming up a beach. It covered the mailbox. It covered the fire hydrant. It came for him.

And every evening, right at that moment, something happened inside his glass head. A little hum. A warm feeling. And then, pop, he was shining, and there was a circle of gold on the sidewalk under him, and the dark could not come in.

"Ha," he would say, every night. "Not tonight, dark."

But he was still afraid, because he did not know what made the light. He thought it just happened to him, like luck. What if one night it didn't?

Then one night there was a storm. The wind blew and the rain came sideways and somewhere far down the street a tree fell across a wire. And all up and down the street, every streetlight went out at once.

Including him.

The dark rushed in. It filled the whole corner. The streetlight could not even see his own foot. He had never been so frightened in his life, and he was quite sure he would never shine again.

Then, out of the dark, came a small voice. "Excuse me. Are you the streetlight?"

It was a little girl, in a raincoat, holding a flashlight. The flashlight made a wobbly circle on the wet sidewalk.

"I am," said the streetlight, in a very small voice for something so tall.

"My mom said you'd be out because the power's out. She said I should say hi so you wouldn't be lonely. I'm not scared of the dark," the girl said. "I've got a flashlight. See? The light is inside. It just needs to be turned on."

The streetlight thought about that all through the storm, watching the little wobbly flashlight circle go up the walk and into the girl's house, and the lamp in the window there.

"The light is inside," he said. "It's mine. It just needs to be turned on."

When the men fixed the wire, near morning, the streetlight came on with a hum, and a pop, and his circle of gold spread out on the sidewalk, and he was not surprised at all. He knew where it came from now.

He is still on that corner. He is still on every night. And he is not afraid anymore, because he knows: the dark can only come as close as the edge of the light, and the light is his.

The end. Close your eyes.

(This is the one for the nights when nothing works. It is meant to be told slower and slower.)

Benny was a little brown bear, and it was time for bed, and Benny was not tired.

"I'm not tired," he told his mother.

"I know," said his mother. "Lie down anyway."

"I'm NOT."

"I know."

Benny lay down in the cave on the soft moss, and he stared at the opening of the cave, where the night was, and where a piece of sky was showing. In the piece of sky were stars.

"Why don't you count them," said his mother. "Just the ones you can see."

So Benny counted. One. That was the big bright one, low down. Two. Three, a little one next to it. Four.

He got to nine and lost his place and had to start over.

One. Two. Three. Benny's paws were heavy. Four. Five. Somewhere outside an owl said its one word, and then said it again. Six. Seven.

"I'm still not tired," Benny said, but his voice had gone soft around the edges.

"I know," said his mother. "Keep counting."

Eight. Nine. Ten. The stars had started to swim a little, the way they do when your eyes are half closed. Eleven. Benny thought the eleventh star might have been the same one as the fourth star. He decided it didn't matter.

Twelve. Thirteen.

His mother put her big warm paw on his back. It went up and down when he breathed. Up, and down.

Fourteen.

Benny thought about the stars. He thought about how they were up there all night whether he counted them or not, and whether he watched them or not, and that they would be right there in the morning, only you couldn't see them because of the sun, and that was all right, they'd be back.

Fifteen.

Everything he was going to do tomorrow was still going to be there tomorrow. The river. The berries. The log that was good for climbing. It was all just waiting. It could wait.

Sixteen. Or maybe fifteen again.

The cave was warm. The moss was soft. The owl said its word, farther off now.

Seventeen, Benny thought, but he did not say it out loud, because saying it would have taken effort, and he had run out of that.

Eighteen.

Benny's mother waited a long moment. Then she said, very quietly, "Benny?"

Nothing. Just up, and down. Up, and down.

"I know," she said, and she closed her eyes too.

Nineteen.

Twenty.

The end.

Angela says she will type up more when I remember them. There is one about a rabbit and a pocket watch that the kids keep asking about but I have told it so many ways I don't know which one is real anymore.

More stories coming this winter, God willing.