During one of my Arkadelphia years (1997 – 2002), I made a 50-item list of New Year’s Resolutions. Whether I copied another’s idea, or because I had so many “important” things that needed doing, I don’t remember. I do know that one of those goals was to write a “column”—though I was not a column writer at the time—by Friday of each week as though I were responsible for one.
        On a 100-degree August day, I wrote.
  
Resolution # 8: Go through one box of clippings per month and file them or toss. Write a poem or article from at least one clipping.
   
        For several years, I had retrieved—with per-mission-- shallow cardboard box tops from gro-cery stores. As I found interesting pictures, head-lines or articles in my reading, I clipped and tossed them into a handy lid.
        Periodically, I would pull a box from under the buffet. Both a fire hazard and a possible mouse nest (if such a creature had come in from the heat), it held stuff from last year’s papers, even one from the very date I was working.
        I went through the lid piece by piece and ended up with three piles: articles on state parks for an upcoming poetry contest, bios and interest-ing “people” features, and a hodge-podge of pic-tures, shorts, cartoons and columns.
        “Sheba’s precursors discovered,” told about archaeologists unearthing advanced villages in Yemen. The word, “poem” is handwritten at the top.
        “Suitors size up Sue, the T-Rex.” A dinosaur skeleton had gone on the auction block. Poem fodder, for sure.
        “Exhibit revives lost art of chewing fat,” an Erma Bombeck take-off possibility. It goes in the I MISS YOU, ERMA folder.
        I revisited clippings of obituaries that piqued my interest. One was for a four-year-old. It read in part, “His major achievements include learning to whistle, swing by himself, ride a bike with training wheels, and write his own name.” I cried over it for the second time.

         The state paper sports editor wrote two obits-cum-columns, one about the death of a daughter of friends in a train accident in Egypt where she was on tour, and another about the tragic death of an “unbelievably good high school athlete” who was killed with a 12-gauge at close range in his small, rural hometown.
        Pictures abounded, maybe for future haiku/senryu, or perhaps just to show grandson Billy: Camels being herded through empty streets of Cairo on a Friday when the weekly Muslim holiday meant that there were no traffic jams. A barefoot boy seriously intent on riding his bicycle. A coach’s one-year-old son holding a football helmet out on the field during media day, and a six-year-old in Trafalgar Square under the dolphin fountain trying to keep cool in the unusually hot British summer.
        If I didn’t tape the stuff I wanted to keep into a notebook, those clippings would be consigned to the recycle bin sooner or later.
        No more box lids. Now I tape clippings into my current notebook-journal. Those are more likely to be kept by my offspring, even if not read for a while – similar to my mom’s hand-written autobiography that sits in a nearby shelf.
        In a notebook dated June 3 of this year – the one propped next to the computer for the “story” ideas it contains – is this clipping from 100 years ago. “FORT SMITH – One of the most peculiar accident that ever occurred on the Frisco happened near [here] on the Stanley trestle when some of the supports of the trestle gave way beneath a passing freight train, allowing the cars to drop to the small creek below. In the plunge not a single car left the rails, the train forming a perfect bow as it spanned the stream.”
        On the same page is the last paragraph of a short clip from The Writer written by Marlene King. I have underlined these words: “Beginnings …must state the premise of the story or topic…Start whenever and wherever you can; then shape the parts into the finished piece.” And I add, then finish it.