For some reason, I have macaroni pieces on my mind.  Remember when we were kids, and we used to spend a fair amount of our time doing “Arts & Crafts” in school, and at camp, or in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, and such?

We used to take macaroni pieces and glue them to paper, and color them with paint or markers to make a picture.  Early brushes with mosaics.  Lots of pieces fitting together to make something beautiful and complete.

Or, how about pipe cleaners.  There used to be whole art classes devoted to conjuring figures out of pipe cleaners.

Then the ultimate construction project with popsicle sticks, or Quaker Oat boxes, or toilet paper cardboard rolls.  Cutting strips of construction paper and weaving them into place mats.  Paper plate art.  Hand-print-finger-paint pictures of turkeys, and rabbits, and butterflies, or whatever.

My personal favorite…. the clay ashtray.  Oh, every time we had a clay ashtray project, I would be happy as a pig in the mud.  And there was no shortage of people to receive this awesome hand made gift.  Everybody smoked, everywhere.

As adults, we just don’t sit down and do the arts & crafts like we used to.  Not most of us.  The world needs more clay ashtrays, I’ll tell you. And popsicle benches.  And pipe cleaner people skiing, or playing tennis.  It is like having a Coke and a Smile.

I would like to think that these things would make the world a better place.  But.  But I think it is going to take a heck of a lot more than Elmer’s Glue to fix the sum of things on this earth of ours.

You see, tonight I watched 60 Minutes on CBS and it scared the holy-heck right out of me.  Not so much the part about the Laser Weapons in outer space.  What really shook me was the father of the Syrian family, weeping, because he had to risk the life of every single person in his family, for them to flee Syria together.  On a ramshackle boat.  All because everyone there in Syria, “everyone, has turned into monsters. No one loves anyone here anymore.  No one.  There is no love.”  And he wept.

And I wished I could scoop them up and take them away from there.  And sit down with them, and make macaroni pictures.  To take all those little pieces and put them together to make a whole picture that was beautiful, and that made sense.  I wanted to watch those kids smile again.  That’s what I wished.