I’ll give you three guesses what song I am humming…and feeling even older because I had to enter the groups name in Google to get their song lyrics instead of Eminem’s because I could only remember the first few lines not the phrase that is the title. Sheesh and am waiting for Pandora to actually play the song I named my playlist, I started that playlist because of the book I read for my morning inspiration.

All that and  I forgot to say, “Good morning, Happy first day of Spring!” Winter tried to hang on with the last few days of cold wettish weather, but today’s sunny skies say it is in fact Spring!

It will be interesting to see what spills out into cyberspace this morning as this is an exercise of writing to my timer.  Yup, I need to get a bit more discipline going in my life again.  So once again setting a timer and just writing; and since my blogs of late have all been recipes or other AZRF related topics I thought I would just do a general blog for my 30 minutes.

The book I read this morning that put me in a Carpenter’s mood, although the term “read” is inadequate for the medium I admired and absorbed, is Peter Sis’ “Conference of the Birds” and the book itself is an inspiring retelling of a favorite 13th century poem with fabric feel pages and intricate details in the art.

It was not the book itself that started my humming, I remembered the first time I read the poem, still too small to really understand the spiritual subtext, I obsessed about how the Penguins were left out of the adventure. The poem tells of a conference of all the birds and then how they fly to find their God in a high mountain to end the worlds troubles, the journey is long and they face the obstacles anyone on a spiritual quest must face and only thirty succeed in entering the mountain. At the end, they are, of course, their own answer and the god they sought is in them. I missed all the important personal growth connotations when I read the poem in grade school, and instead obsessed about the Penguins.

Penguins can’t fly, I was indignant that they got left behind not because they were afraid or wrapped up in their own agenda but because they just can’t fly. This bothered me enough to do rewrites and invent various solutions from magical increase in penguin wings to swans who carried the willing penguins in hammocks between two of them holding ends in their beaks. I did rewrites and drew art that flummoxed my elementary teachers.

“What are you drawing Miss de Biasi?”

“Two swans carrying a penguin to the mountains of God.”

“Why?”

“Because penguins can’t fly.’

After a couple of weeks they sent me to see the school counselor who asked me to draw something else, which I did, but that is another story.

So anyway, while reading Sis’ version I remembered the dilemna of my youth and how being a bit of a “penguin” among flight birds I never seemed to fit, and then that song popped into my head, and I turned on my Pandora station and turned on my timer, then just had to know the rest of the lyrics and well that leads up back to now and only five more minutes on my timer, and me having given up on the Pandora station and switched to Carpenters on my I-tunes, which being old I can work better than Pandora as I have been I-podding for five years and Pandora-ing only one.

As to the Carpenters. I believe their music and that of Carol King’s are the epitome of early seventies pop. The flavors of Jazz, Nashville, and Rock are all kind of blended up with just the right amount of sweetness and pain. If they were a 21st century food they would be a blended coffee drink, the hot, bitter shot of reality so well swathed in smooth sounds and sweet phraseology by perfect voices that it slips down easy and dessert like. If, by some chance, you are to young to have ever listened to their early albums and are in a Colbie Caillat or Jack Johnson mood try out “Tapestry” by Carol King or the 1971 self titled Carpenters or my favorite the 1972 Carpenters album “A Song for You”.

As to Sis’ take on the ancient “A Confederate of Birds”, this is a perfect gift book equal to Gibran’s “The Prophet” or   Silverstein’s “Giving Tree” for simplicity hiding the deepest truths and all packaged in a visually appealing and tactile pleasing package.

And my timer has gone off and so I must get on with my day that is neither Monday or Rainy, but I still think I might just play that one again…..