yellow bird days
Click to viewposted this song on my fb too. it reminded me of a primary school p.e. teacher, mr reuben john. he performed it for the kids one children's day a lifetime ago, just seated on a plastic chair in the middle of the school stage, just him and his guitar, and a nice deep voice that many tall dark men like him seem to possess.
it was the first time i had heard the song. as kids, many of us were amused at the repetitive "yellow bird" and the easy-to-catch lyrics, which while we didn't quite understand at the time, still found it quite funny.
funny how the mind manages to store such seemingly trivial information. i remember mr john, the quirky charming almost-jamaicany way he sang it. he may have been my first non-chinese man crush, though i didn't know it at the time, of course.
maybe that's how i grew up having a fondness for tall dark men. but then, i have a great many fondnesses. i also have a great fondness for a number of island-type folk songs ... they bring me back to my happy childhood days.
in upper secondary, i also learnt to amuse and entertain my classmates with the same song. though i often look back at my secondary school days with dread, those sec four days were happy days too.
happy because subjects streaming had helped me find a place in my upper sec class of people who were mostly like me -- naturals in english language and literature and just sucky in math and science, people who were less conventional and thought less of rules and regulations and restrictions than did typical chinese top school students. ours was quite a notorious class, i believe teachers thought us talented but rebellious or simply problematic.
but studies became more of a joy for me then. of course, by then my maths and sciences were also improving, having had the fear of getting into poly drilled well into me. i also remember some of us throwing our souls into our english compositions -- for the first time in years, a classmate and i were competing for first place, not last. in writing, i often did better, but a few times when he did, i secretly couldn't comprehend how his fantastical essays on battleships and war was any better than mine on strandedness, captivity, freedom and second chances. lol.
happyish school days, those were. i guess i had enough happy days for nostalgia, and also enough unhappy days to make me especially cherish those happy ones. those happy, carefree, yellow-bird days.