MEDIUM RARE 

Season’s greetings!

‘Tis a sensitive, sensible radio dj who knows what music to play on a station that prides itself on touching those sentimental souls who have enough memories to sing along with Tony Bennett, Jerry Vale, et al. If you like old songs, you’ll like DWWW, late at night, especially.

Which is why I bothered to look up the lyrics of the national anthem of the rainy season. With music and words by Bennett and Alejandro Sanz, it’s a song that says it all: “Yesterday I heard the rain whispering your name, asking where you’d gone. It fell softly from the clouds on the silent crowds as I wandered on...”

It’s a descriptive song that talks about black umbrellas and “faceless people... in a city full of shadows, without pity.” A pity we’ve run out of junior George Cansecos and Louie Ocampos who might have given us rainy weather songs that we could be humming and singing along with Martin Nievera. The only other song (that I know) with a similar emotional content begins with “Today, while the blossom clings to the vine, I will taste your strawberries, I will drink your sweet wine” – a “today” that eventually and inevitably retreats into yesterday as the lyrics move on.

Sentimental, indeed, but that’s the mood that lingers, what rain does to our abilities to imagine, remember and dream. (The same rain could leave you wishing your worst enemy drowning in the dirtiest floodwaters.) Aside from this salubrious thought, rain is good for sleeping uninterrupted through the long dark wet night.

While celebrating a gentle season of rain I’m glad, as a follower of television news, that at last we have a professional meteorologist in the person of ABS-CBN’s forecaster, Ariel Rojas, delivering the nightly weather report but who’s also the station’s resident forecaster in good weather and foul. For good measure, he’s young and a smart and spiffy dresser, too.

Meanwhile, as we wish for good weather in our lives, there’s always hope – as in PAGASA, the name of our faithful weather bureau.

The forecast is fair: no strong wind and rain ‘til much later in the year. Enjoy your plans for the coming weekends! But always keep that umbrella, black or colorful, ready for some heavy duty.