Over the Hills and Far Away

iTunes recently obtained permission to sell Led Zeppelin songs, and so a couple of weeks ago I downloaded about 15 of my favorites. As I cleaned our apartment two Sundays ago, I listened to a little Led Zep on my iPod, and I was immediately transported back to high school.

Some time around my junior or senior year of high school, I officially entered my Led Zeppelin phase. It was short-lived -- I pretty much stopped listening to any of their tapes once I got to college -- but in the latter year or two of high school, after U2, they were my favorite band. Listening to a bunch of their songs now took me back to a small room in the basement of a Northwestern University dorm, Thanksgiving week 1986. Two of the larger high school debate tournaments of the year were held in the Glenbrook high schools (Glenbrook North and Glenbrook South) in the Chicago suburbs on the weekends that bookended the Thanksgiving week. During the week, the top 10 or so teams in the country participated in an invite-only round robin tournament. My partner Sameer and I believed that we were one of those top 10 or so teams, but we had failed to convince the right people. Indeed, in one of our last tournaments of the year as juniors, we debated in front of the guy who made the Chicago round robin invite decisions, and we had our worst performance of the year. As such, no invite to the round robin. So we spent the week in between the Glenbrook tourneys with the other team from our high school (my friends Rich and Bob), researching in the Northwestern library, and sleeping in a cramped basement room in a dorm where Sameer's cousin, Bimol, lived. Rich brought his boombox with him, and we listened to Zeppelin almost nonstop. We did some half-hearted research in the library, gawked at the unobtainable college girls, and got on each other's nerves. I discovered that the nearby campus cafeteria served an amazing Patty Melt, and I ate one for lunch almost every day. I have been searching for a Patty Melt of equivalent virtue ever since, and have yet to find one. I don't remember what we did for Thanksgiving dinner that week. Did our coach, Greg Varley, take us out to dinner? Probably.

Validating our opinions of ourselves, Sameer and I had the second-best overall performance by any team that participated in both Glenbrook tourneys (each tourney featuring over 100 teams from all over the country): we made it to the quarterfinals of the first, and the semifinals of the second . We figured that that performance had sealed our invite for the final prestigious round robin of the year, at Harvard, but when those invites were released, four New York teams were invited, and we were not among them. We were so crushed by this rejection that we went out the next weekend at the Lexington, MA debate tournament and beat two of those round robin teams en route to winning the tournament without losing a single judge's ballot all weekend (the debate equivalent of pitching a no-hitter). I suppose there was some valuable life lesson to have been learned there, or maybe what didn't kill me made me stronger or something. Mellow is the man who knows what he's been missing. Many, many men can't see the open road.