Both are in Kalama, Washington, that two-square-mile town near the Washington border where people stop for gas on the way to Portland.
The pie was the stuff of melancholy: canned fruit glop scooped into an individual pie shell and barely microwaved. But the October 3 issue of The Reflector (“the newspaper with integrity”) was the stuff of suicide.
There was the lead story about the volunteer fireman who got fired from his volunteer job and is threatening to sue the city to get his volunteer job back. There was the story about the little girl with the horse named Lisa’s Breeze. There was the police blotter item about Kyle J. Gorman, 21, who was “booked into Cowlitz Co. jail for theft of a donation jar.”
Then there was the obituary for a certain Mr. Root that contained this two-sentence paragraph
Root loved Jesus, basketball, and music.
He was disabled.
