You might ask - and you have every right to - why would a river drying up cause people to stop singing? I'm sure you'd admit that it's a sad occurrence, but that alone doesn't explain why it would impede people's desire to sing. It's not as if their voice boxes had all been ripped out, or God had suddenly added an eleventh commandment which read, "Thou Shalt Not Sing." You're driving yourslef out of your skull trying to find the correlation. But don't worry. I can tell you.
The reason was that there were no longer any fish left to sing for. You see, the people loved the fish and wanted to make them happy. I could not stress to any excess how happy the fish made them . . .their brilliant yellow and blue color dazzled everyone. People of all ages would gather by the river and sing every song they could think of from Gilbert and Sullivan to The Beatles to The Red Hot Chili Peppers to Snoop Doggy Dog. They never though to ask the fishs' opinions on such matters, but everyone was certain the fish loved every minute of it. Who wouldn't?
But then came that terrible day, and the river dried up, and the fish died, and the people had to stop singing. They gathered the still stunningly beautiful bodies of whatever fish they could salvage and held numerous little funerals for them. They got a priest to perform Latin incantations, and anyone who wished to could step forward and say some nice things about the fish. But nobody sang any songs, for none of them could see the point.
The people began to take comfort in these funerals. They looked forward to the ceremonies as their chief excitement in life.
"What a wonderful thing these funerals are!" one of them would say, and the rest would echo in agreement. "We can still do nice things for the fish, even if they are dead. And what a meaningless existence this would be if we could never do anything nice!"
Everyone cried, "Amen!" to this, and then went and had another funeral. It was all so lovely that they forgot to be unhappy about not being able to sing anymore.
Then, one day, all the fish had had their funerals said for them.
That made everyone sad. The fish were all buried, and flowers were placed on their grave, and nobody could think of one more thing they could do to be nice to the fish. "There is no meaning left in our lives!" one of them said.
But one man knew that all was not lost. Thank God for individuals like him, who think on their feet in times of crisis and save their people from the clutches of disaster!
"Fish aren't the only things we can have funerals for, you know," he said. "Other things die, too!"
So with a newfound purpose in life, the townspeople searched far and wide for mode dead things, but all they were able to find was a flattened dead skunk in the middle of the road. It was hardly enough for a substantial diet of funerals.
"No worries," said the same man, "Dead things are always live things first. And there are plenty of live things around here!"
It was true. There were crickets, cats, beetles, possums, and more skunks everywhere. And all it took to change them into dead things was a blow to their heads, it was discovered! Joy to the people! They would be able to hold their nice funerals for a year or more! So they began to kill these animals, and they held so many funerals that they never felt better about themselves.
"You know how good we are?" said one woman, "We're so good that, I bet, a long time after we're dead, folks will read about our lives and feel selfish and ashamed that they aren't half as good as we were. And they'll probably canonize us."
Of course, they all nodded in agreement.
Well, actually, maybe not all of them. There was this one little girl who didn't like the funerals at all. She thought them dreadfully boring, especially since nobody even sang. She felt awfully sorry for the fish, the crickets, the cats, the beetles, the possums, and the skunks. "When I die, they better not give a funeral for me ," she thought.
And in the middle of one of the funerals, she did the unthinkable. She started to sing.
Everyone, in the midst of their selfless mourning, turned their heads toward the little girl. They were too astonished to disapprove and reprimand her.
They heard the little voice pour forth these words:
As she sang, and noticed everyone looking at her, she began to smile. It was the first time the people had seen anyone smile since the fish died. Some of them began to wonder if the funerals were really making them happy after all. They began to sing under their breath. Soon, they discovered that they really liked it, even without the fish.
"We're going about this whole happiness thing the wrong way!" someone said. "Doing nice things for others doesn't make us happy! We need to do things only for ourselves! Let's all be entirely selfish from now on!"
And so they did, and to this day they are, and even though you sigh and shake your head at them, and so do I, at least they stopped having all those stupid funerals.