Yes, you’re in the right place; you don’t have a virus; well, maybe you do, but that’s a whole different subject. This is Morning News in Verse and you are either receiving this in your email (thank you subscribers, we love you) or are getting it through Facebook (we love you too, but it’s more like a puppy love). Due to an increasingly diminishing number of requests, we’ve made a decision to change our format from mostly verse and some prose to mostly prose and some verse. Our number of ‘hits’ tell us that it’s what you would prefer as well.
We’ll still make fun of the Headlines, Money, Sports and Life, but only occasionally; rather, we’ll proffer samples of ‘A Bird’s Eye View’ of life-observations. Sometimes our observations will be from the road, usually the one less traveled, and sometimes they will be from just around the corner. Sometimes we’ll write about insignificant, Andy Rooney-kinds of things and other times we’ll offer observations on this process of growing older, but not necessarily up.
So let’s start with our new name, ‘A Bird’s Eye View’; it is, of course, a play on words of the name Sparrow, but it also has some family history to it. In 1940 our parents moved to Novato, a small, northern California town, where our father, Jack (yes, Jack Sparrow, but no relation to Johnny Depp) bought the Novato Advance, a local, weekly newspaper, and at 26 became the youngest newspaper publisher in California. It was truly a ‘Mom and Pop’ business – our dad hand-set the type and operated the printing presses while our mom, who could also operate a pretty mean linotype machine, attended the town meetings to gather the local gossip, or news as she called it. She also spiced up the paper by chronicling the comings and goings of Novato’s social elite, such as they were. Those familiar with small town newspapers know what we’re talking about. Jim and Mabel Cranston were visited on Sunday by Mabel’s sister, Iris from Ukiah; she brought an apple pie – Jim had seconds. Our mother originally called her column, A Little Bird Told Me and later changed it to A Bird’s Eye View. When we recently asked her about why she changed the name, she first said, “Who are you two?” At 93, we forgave her for not remembering the details of a newspaper column from nearly 70 years ago. Our theory is this: etymologically speaking, ‘A Little Bird Told Me’ sounds like second-hand information, like we’re not sure if this is true, but we heard from someone that yadda, yadda, yadda. ‘A Bird’s Eye View’, on the other hand, seems to suggest more of a first-hand, optimum perspective of things. Our mother could neither confirm nor deny our theory.
However the name came about, we’ve decided that it’s ours and we’re bringing it out of retirement. We hope you enjoy our new direction.
