12 Years For A Song (memories of a long gone past)

I remember while in high school, our English teacher, a totally original and kind of rebel teacher used to try to teach us English in various ways. One of these ways was gathering us to watch a movie that had no subtitle, for ex I remember watching like this Dickens’ Great expectations. There were many ways she tried to teach some stubborn teenagers a language that will later serve us in so many unexpected ways.

So, once she brought a cassette player and she played 2 songs asking us to reproduce those songs after that hour. Nobody managed to reproduce those songs, if I well remember but those songs followed me to this day!

I didn’t know who was singing there and I couldn’t tell the lyrics either, I only remembered a few of them that didn’t make sense in English, the melody and the warm feeling they started in me each time they came to my mind.

It was I think 5 years later when I identified the first song, after searching it on the internet for those 2-3 verses I remembered and with a little help from some of my friends who listened me singing them. The song was Those were the days of Mary Hopkins, a song that will always hunt my memories and will always bring me back to high school, not for the meaning of the lyrics but because my history with this song started there.

The second song I hasn’t been able to identify..until today and this is the very reason for which I have started this post.I remembered a slow ballad on some acoustic guitar and some mirror lyrics kind of a “Jonny was the girl who lived next door/Jimmy was the boy…16/24″…well,that started the confusion…

I didn’t manage to find that song cause the name was not Johnny, even my ears seemed very convinced, something about that Johnny name who was supposed to be a girl told me I was going wrong…until today.

Searching again for those lyrics, I have actually found that the name is not Johnny, but…Joni and the song is Don’t cry,Joni of Conway Twitty and seems to have been a hit around Philippines at one moment. Well, I haven’t been there so I hope to be excused for not knowing it.

I just want to say I feel like I have conquered my personal Himalaya peak today, after I have found and listened again this song that brings back so many memories and feelings. Here’s the song and I hope you will enjoy it, even it may not mean anything to you.

By the way, Steluta Istratescu is the name of my high school English teacher and I feel that I owe her a lot.Beside the English language, back then I didn’t have a proper guitar but I was involved in a lot of musical things there, so she gave me an acoustic guitar that was my acoustic instrument of choice for more than 10 years.She is a Lady and a great teacher and if by any chance she’ll get to read this blog, PLEASE EXCUSE MY ENGLISH!!!