The Rusted Root of my memory

My iTunes Genius threw Rusted Root's "Send Me on My Way" onto a playlist that I had it generated based on Cursive's "the Recluse" (the latter being descriptive of both my physical being and my state of mind lately).  I haven't heard "Send Me on My Way" in a few months (it's buried on some playlist on my iPod, so it does pop into my consciousness occasionally).  It's one of those songs, though, that has an extremely strong memory association, one that pops briefly into mind every time I hear it.  The strange thing (to me, anyway) is that the associated memory isn't one that has any strong emotional pull or any real significance in my life at all.

During the summer in between junior and senior year of high school, I spent three weeks at a Summer Writing Camp at Carleton College.  Carleton is a microscopic, highly-regarded liberal arts college in Northfield, MN, a tiny town of about 15,000 roughly an hour southeast of the Twin Cities.  The writing camp was, despite years of whining, begging, pleading and arguing, my only summer camp experience.  We slept in rooms in the dorms, had a midnight "curfew" (meaning that the RAs walked by and did room checks every night to make sure we were back), spent a few hours most days in a combination of composition and literature type classes, quite a bit of time writing and critiquing each other's writing, and the rest of the time playing Ultimate Frisbee, listening to people play guitar, flirting, swimming, writing more, dancing, jumping through thunderstorm-created puddles, being eaten alive by the omnipresent bird-sized mosquitoes of Minnesota.  It was idyllic.  I gained a much better sense of how to construct an essay and how to brainstorm in a way that worked with my erratic thought patterns; my poetry remained (as it does to this day) a dismal mess.

And I had a boy breakthrough, as it were, thanks to crushing on this guy Joe-Lastnameforgotten.  It was the first time in my life that flirting actually seemed to work (successful flirting was not the breakthrough):  I managed to get to cuddle with him while hanging out by campfires and splash with him in the pool, and (exciting for a relatively inexperienced virgin) got a lengthy post-curfew backrub while out by a swingset, flopped in the grass and being eaten alive by bugs.  I only managed to avoid getting busted for getting in late because my roommate told the RA I was in the bathroom when she came by for the roomcheck.  Yet after the backrub incident, Joe backed way the hell off and stopped talking to me altogether.  In normal (i.e., back home) circumstances, I would have wondered and angsted and avoided confrontation like it was my job.  However, being that I was 500 miles away from home and knowing that if I made things awkward, I'd never see him again after that week, I cornered him and asked him what the hell his deal was.  And it worked:  he explained that the girl back home he'd had a thing for forever had let him know she wanted to try dating when he got back, so he'd cut the flirting with me when he'd heard from her.  So the breakthrough was this:  I figured out that it was a hell of a lot quicker to just ask a guy what the hell than it was to try and figure it out for myself, and that whatever answer I got from the guy was likely to be more accurate than anything I came up with on my own.

None of this, however, has anything to do with the "Send Me on My Way" memory.  The picture that comes into my head with absolute clarity nearly every time I hear that song is banal in the most everyday type of way:  I had just eaten lunch with some friends and was wandered by the post office in the Student Union on my way back to my room to get my stuff for an afternoon writing critique group.  Sitting at the post office desk was a guy with shaggy blond hair, baggy shorts, a ratty tshirt, and Birkenstocks (pretty much the Carleton uniform) - he had to be a work study student, leaning way back in his chair with a dog-eared copy of Neitzsche and talking to some girl that was leaning into a doorframe on the wall opposite where I was standing.  There were papers and boxes everywhere, posters of every imaginable band crammed  He had "Send Me on My Way" blasting on a boombox.  I got my mail (only a note from the camp telling everyone we'd be heading up to the Minneapolis Zoo that Saturday) and wandered off.  That's it.  Yet for some reason, that's what enters my head when I hear "Send Me on My Way."

I don't know.  Maybe I had concocted some idea that college would look like that - easy and relaxed with Rusted Root playing everywhere, long conversations about philosophy in between games of Ultimate.  Maybe it was just that I hadn't heard the song in a while and noticed it because I liked it.  It could be just that it was a particularly relaxed moment in a happy stretch of summer days.  But there it is:  "Send Me on My Way" reminds me of the post office in the student union at Carleton College.