Sunday, January 1, 2012

The Year in Review

One time when I was on the road doing some storytelling, I read a newspaper that was full of stuff that I thought had to be made up.  Of course it wasn't.  It was "real."  So I underlined the headlines, one after another.  And then cut them out of the newspaper and taped them into my journal and they looked like this --

Two die as car speeds off lift-bridge into river

Woman believed to have stolen baby

Police kill wandering emu in suburban St Louis

Man bites panda; panda bites man

Cat kills dog; man kills cat

Hawk attacks people

Voters decided on instant runoff

Maintenance man wins 163 million

Space station receives toxin scare

Bismarkers want world snow angel title back

***

Yes, the whole voyald, as William Saroyan once said, and all the people and animals
in it hopping and popping and scrapping.  I am siding with the five-year-old Jamaican girl
who read her own one-line poem on a stage where I was proud to be part of a program with
Cedella Marley and our daughter, Mariah Fox.  So what did the little girl read?

She stood before hundreds of people and shook a plastic bottle full of uncooked rice
and said in a very loud voice:

"Stop the violence NOW!"

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