Saturday, January 28, 2012

Memory Lane

I'm home this weekend.

Not my childhood home, but the adult one. The place where I went away to college and first lived as an adult and, wow, it feels nice.

It's unseasonably warm for January so I was driving around town this afternoon, after hanging out with a friend and her little boy this morning, on my way to meet up with another friend, and I had my windows down on my car and my sun roof open. The weird-for-January weather brought back memories of another unseasonably warm January day, from my first year in college.

My friends and I had the afternoon free and it was 70 degrees and gorgeous out. We decided we would venture from our sleepy suburban college town and check out downtown. We didn't have a specific destination in mind, just "downtown." So we got on the highway and headed south until we reached the tall buildings. We found a place to park and walked around, stumbling upon a large marketplace. After growing up outside of Baltimore I was expecting it to be like Harborplace. I was wrong.

We went in and found a largely deserted market, with a half empty food court and only a couple of small shops that were still operating.

This was it? This was what the city had to offer? Blah.

We ate lunch and returned to the car, deciding there had to be more to see and do. There just had to be.

As we drove past one of the universities in the city luck would have it my friend saw one of her high school friends outside, enjoying the day as well. We stopped to chat and he was much more city savvy than we were, so he pointed us in the direction of a great shopping district. A mix of boutiques, thrift stores, local book & music stores and restaurants, it was exactly what we wanted!

The afternoon ended with one of my friends purchasing a powder blue 70s style tux and a royal blue patterned smoking jacket. Neither of which he had any use for, but after seeing them he couldn't imagine leaving them behind. If I came home with any new finds I don't recall, but all in all I have such positive fun memories of that day.

So back to today, I'm in my car, remembering this day when all of the sudden I notice the song playing on the radio - Dust on the Bottle. A random country song, from the late 90s that for some unknown reason lead to another of my most memorable nights from that first year of college. A silly, fun, crazy night when my country music loving roommate hooked the rest of us non country fans in with this song. We listened to it again and again, singing loudly and dancing around my dorm room.

It all sounds like such little things. An afternoon of shopping, a song played over and over in a college dorm room, but wow, do those memories make me smile.

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