A kind of September
“Try to remember
The kind of September…..”
- from a popular song
of the sixties
For me, the month of September is one that brings back memories of that beautiful song Try to Remember, the work of American lyricist Tom Jones and composer Harvey Schmidt. It was written in 1965 as the theme song for the off-Broadway musical The Fantasticks – which went on to become the longest running musical in history.
It is one of those songs of the sixties that will bring back memories of days gone by to all those who listen to it, the music and words evoking such a sense of nostalgia. Many versions have been beautifully performed over the years by artists from Jerry Orbach who first sang it in The Fantasticks to legends like Andy Williams, Harry Belafonte and Nana Mouskouri. These days one can just Google the song and listen on YouTube to varied renditions of the original.
But the words and the music never fail to move me whenever I hear it – because the lyrics bring back so many memories of the Septembers of yesteryear.
“Try to remember
the kind of September
When life was slow and oh so mellow
Try to remember
the kind of September
When grass was green and
grain was yellow
Try to remember
the kind of September
When you were a young
and callow fellow.”
I have now reached that stage of my life when I am well aware that there are many more years behind me than there are ahead of me – when in fact my contemporaries and I have lived through September and are slowly getting close to December – so it’s nice to reminisce and remember the kinds of September that helped us callow young men of the Sixties to mature and mellow into our sixties.
The first version of Try to Remember that I heard was on a 33 RPM vinyl record (I wonder how many of my readers would have seen one of those!) that I received as a gift from my penfriend in Bermuda. In the days of my teens, we had neither emails nor mobile phones to keep us in real time contact with folk in other parts of the world. Even a phone call to someone outside Colombo had to be booked through the telephone operator – they were called trunk calls in those days – and not only did they cost much more than local calls, there was often a waiting time before the operator at the telephone exchange could connect you!
So we relied on the postal service for communication. I myself had four penfriends –in Bermuda, Australia, Malta and Malaysia – with whom I would exchange handwritten letters and postage stamps (we were all stamp collectors of a sort) a few times each year. Letters sent by sea mail would take about a month to reach Bermuda, while aerogrammes (we used to call them ‘airletters’) usually took a week to ten days. It used to give me quite a thrill to come home from school and find an envelope with colourful stamps waiting for me! Having penfriends in not so well-known places like Bermuda and Malta gave me the wonderful opportunity of getting to know someone my own age from another land and to learn about a different culture.
After a year or so of writing to each other my Bermudan penfriend sent me a gift of a musical record from which I first got to hear the song Try to Remember.
I kept in touch with all my penfriends over the years, and although the letters got fewer after we all grew up and our lives became busy, we made it a point to write to each other at least once a year around Christmastime. Even now, 50 years later, I still keep in touch with my friends in Bermuda, Malta and Malaysia. The penfriend in Australia, with whom I also kept in regular contact and even finally met face to face after I moved to live in Australia, sadly passed away last year.
And as December approaches, it is nice for us to remember those days when we were young and carefree. Those were the halcyon days before we had to go out to work to earn a living, bring up our families and live with a lot of responsibilities that we did not have in our teenaged Septembers.
Listening to that song again, I too feel that “Deep in December it’s nice to remember the times in September that made us mellow”.
I am grateful that we had the kind of September that I can still look back on with fond and happy memories.
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