LETTERS FROM HOME: THE CALAMITY OF CAKE AND ICE CREAM

Dec. 1, 1994

Dear Carly,

Thank you for coming to see us over the holiday. Your Aunt DC and I loved having our nieces and nephew over for the bunking party. Now we know lots of new hiding places in our house and how to get cranberry juice out of the carpet and that '90s children prefer "Jurassic Park" to "The Shaggy Dog."

There's something I'm still wondering about though. It's when your grandfather served you ice cream and cake in the same bowl and you got upset. So he brought them to you in separate bowls but you cried even more because there was still a cake crumb in the ice cream bowl.

We finally figured out the problem but I'm still curious about what it all meant. I asked your Aunt DC, who tends to eat one thing at a time and only likes lettuce in her salad.

"Border dispute," was all she said.

You probably don't know what she means, and I might not either, so I wrote this story to try to figure it out.

Once upon a time, everything in the world was separate. People liked the world that way.

Yours was yours and mine was mine. It was very easy to settle arguments.

Rainbows only had three colors. Trees were blue. Oatmeal was red. Mountains were yellow.

It was very easy to adjust your TV.

People stayed in their own country, which meant they never bothered with foreign languages or ate unusual food.

"This is the way the world ought to be," they said.

The truth is, people were just afraid that unless they kept everything separate the whole world would turn into a discombobulated mess. That's a big mess.

What would happen if we let the blue and yellow mix?, they wondered. "Calamity," said the people of the world.

And what if I let my neighbor use my lawnmover?, they asked themselves. "It might disappear from the Earth," people worried.

And the biggest What: What if we let other people get to know us and join with them instead of keeping to ourselves? "Oh no, no, no," said the people of the world. "I can't be me and we, too."

That's the way it was when everything in the world was separate.

But the world couldn't stay that way forever. The blue and the yellow longed to combine, and green was born.

When the people of the world saw how beautiful green was they went a little crazy.

They wore stripes with solid-colored clothes.

They began playing guitars and drums at the same time.

Salt and vinegar potato chips were invented.

Neighbors who shared their tools discovered that they usually were returned.

Once the people of the world realized they had nothing to fear from each other they quit hurting each other.

Countries got the idea, too. They became friendlier and the borders between them began to disappear.

They were still afraid sometimes, but the people of the world saw that all this was good. They understood that it is better to join than to separate.

They discovered that cake is delicious, ice cream too, and that cake and ice cream is the best of calamities.

Love, Uncle Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.