I got out of work early today for the long holiday weekend, and found myself a little taken aback by the unaccustomed pleasure of seeing an entire afternoon stretched out before me with nothing on the agenda. I considered a number of options for what I could do with my free time. I ended up taking the light rail up to the U of U campus and meeting a buddy of mine for lunch, with a detour along the way to the U Bookstore.

I haven’t set foot in the Bookstore in years, possibly not since I graduated a decade and a half ago. The whole experience filled me with deja vu — it’s not much different now than in my own student days, aside from the flat-screen TVs and life-size Master Chief statue in the lobby — but the most evocative aspect of the scene was the music playing on the PA system, a song I remember very well, “Crazy” by Icehouse. Here’s the video:

Two thoughts occurred to me as I wandered among racks of familiar-looking red t-shirts while listening to a band whose name I had to really work to retrieve from the memory banks: can I really have been out of school long enough for the music that was popular when I was in school to become “golden oldies retail ambiance”? And if so, is the Bookstore’s manager simply playing the same damn tapes he had way back then?

On any other day, this epiphany would’ve made me feel positively ancient. Today, though, I was walking around free during my normal working hours, feeling vaguely like a kid playing hooky. And it was just plain good to hear this song again… and on that note, Happy Thanksgiving everyone…