Mary Black Days...or Just Rainy Days

I don't know about you but the last few -- wet and rainy -- days brought me back decades....right to 1971 when the Klang Valley experienced the longest rainy spell ever.

They called it the 1971 floods. It was that bad. Schools had to be closed because the high waters rendered so many places inaccessible.
Many parts of the federal highway were submerged in water. The federal highway - after the EPF and near Kampung Kerinchi - looked like a river.

It was raining everyday for nearly two weeks. Maybe longer.

Us kids, of course, stayed home and had to keep ourselves occupied.

Nope. There were no computers, nor the internet. No mobile phones. No...oh never mind.

What we had was good old fashioned fun.

Those days, we did a lot of things outdoors. Indoors, we would be reading, listening to records, or playing cards or board games.

When you're 15, you'd certainly be listening to music.

That was how my friends and I filled our time, those rainy days in '71.

Oh...those were carefree days. I was in form four. In my day, they called it the "honeymoon year". I'm sure that has not changed.
{Form four was snuggled in between Form 3 (LCE - lower certificate of education like the present-day PMR and Form 5 (MCE - Malaysian certificate of education like the present-day SPM).}

My (late) sister, Kak Eda and I had the same set of friends and they'd come around in the evenings to listen to records. Oh, have I mentioned that we did not have CDs back then.

(Records? For those of you born in the last few decades of the last century -- go ask your parents. or grandparents.)

We'd play James Taylor, Carole King, Simon and Garfunckel, Elton John, Three Dog Nite, Led Zeppelin and God-knows whatever else.

But, those rainy days, my particular favourite was James Taylor's "Fire And Rain".

Since then, rainy days would somehow bring me back to those days when Kak Eda and I would be lounging around our living room with our friends, just listening to music; to "Fire And Rain".

Until I discovered Mary Black.
Oh. Mary Black changed my life. More or less.
Her pioneering album "No Frontiers" touched me like no other had in a long time. There is so much depth and emotion in her voice, her songs. I had never been moved the way she moved me.

Listening to Mary Black puts me in a kind of emotional rollercoaster. In a pleasant, pleasing way.

It makes me happy when I am sad: rivets me when I am happy. It hits a higher note for me on rainy days, the way "Fire and Rain" had done, but in a more emotional way.

Nearly 40 years today, I still get the same nostalgic bumps on rainy days, and "Fire and Rain" never fails to play in my head.

But, the past few days, it's Mary Black that's playing in my head.