Dedication Page
This is a story about once upon a song.
The earth was brand new then. the sky was bluer than the color of your blue crayon!
Everything else was still waiting to be colored in...
It was awfully quiet in this brand new world.
It was so quiet that you could hear the sun come up in the morning.
You could hear the moon step in front of the sun at night.
And everywhere you looked, anywhere and everywhere, all you could see were big, white, round things.
I think I’ll call them “eggs” , because that’s what they were....
Beautiful mountains of shiny, smooth eggs.
Only these eggs were different than the eggs you and I buy at the supermarket.
As a matter of fact, you couldn’t buy them at the supermarket at all, because there weren’t any supermarkets.
And you couldn’t fry them or even poach them.
What could you do with them?
Inside each and every egg was a person.
Someone just like you and me, he and she.
In the very smallest tiniest egg lived a girl named Teenee.
She had short brown curly hair and a great big smile. Only she didn’t know that her smile was just that, a smile.
She was born with a smile and just kept laughing and chuckling all day long.
The egg next door to Teenee’s was a little bit larger. A boy lived inside.
He didn’t have a name. What he did have was a song. He couldn’t remember where he had learned the song or whether he had made it up.
All the same it was his song and he sang it all day long.
It went something like this:
“I live in here with hardly a care!
I eat flowers all day and sing, laugh, and play
And next door to the boy who sang all day, lived a little girl with braids.
They weren’t just ordinary braids. They were very special braids that came all the way down to her knees.
Sometimes she sat on them just for fun.
Other times she rolled them up on each side of her head and made believe that she has rabbit ears.
She could hear all the birds chirping and the daffodils dancing and the creepy crawlers crawling with these special braids.
Oh, there were thousands, millions, trillions of other eggs, and each one had a different sort of little boy or girl inside, just like you and me, he or she.
One day, the wind got into a really mischievous mood.
She started breathing and whooshing so hard that all trees began to shake and tremble and jiggle.
Some of these trees had been standing for a very long, long time. They were getting tired of having to stand up so straight. They were sort of happy that the wind was pushing them to the ground. They were so happy that they sat down to rest.
And where do you think they landed?
Right on top of the eggs!
All the eggs started splitting and cracking and breaking.
And before you could say “Stop stop the eggs are gonna pop!”
They all burst wide open.
and the little girl with the braids was just starting to comb her hair into six different ponytails.
Teenee was right in the middle of one her biggest and widest smiles ever.
The boy with the song was just starting on his “Tra la las”
No
one
knew what had happened, but everyone started popping their heads out.
“Crack”-out came hands, feet, eyes, noses....
Pretty soon everyone had broken their eggs into teeny, tiny shells!
Asked Teenee to no one in particular.
After all, she didn’t know that there were any other people around.
Her smile disappeared and instead a great, big, ugly frown appeared!!
Asked the boy who used to sing. His song had magically disapeared.
As a matter of fact he was screaming at Teenee loud and clear!!
Wailed the little girl with the braids. Her six ponytails were now one big mess.
She could hardly see anything at all...
All of a sudden, it got very very quiet.
Teenee stopped frowning.
The boy with the song stopped screaming.
The little girl with the braids stopped crying.
They all stood and stared at each other.
Teenee looked at the boy with the song and said, “I’m Teenee, but who are you?”
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“I haven’t got a name, but I’ve got a song and I’ll sing it for you.”
He started to sing before anyone could say, “I don’t care if you do have a song, I don’t know what a “song” is, and I want my egg back!”
And then something wonderful happened!
All the boys and girls began to creep out of their shells...
Terribly tall children, sort of shy children, happy snappy children, short and sweet children, children, children everywhere!
Silence, silence everywhere. Nobody said a word.
They didn’t know what to say... they had never talked to anyone. There wasn’t anyone to talk to in their shells.
One by one, step by step, all the tall, shy, happy, sweet, boys and girls held hands and learned to sing.
Tra la la la la la....
