I hear any Led Zeppelin song but “Stairway to Heaven,” and I am immediately in the backseat of an old Saab, hurtling up the coast of Maine. (I’ve got other stories about “Stairway to Heaven.” I just choose not to tell them, MamaKitt, so don’t you tell on me!)

When I was a junior or senior in high school, I went to a weekend retreat for young writers along with two of my classmates. It was a big deal that my parents let me make the three-hour trek with these classmates, neither of whom they knew super well, and one of whom would be driving. I do seem to recall a parental confab at the driver’s house (oh how embarrassing) in advance of the trip, to make sure we’d all behave and act responsibly.

The retreat was populated by the pretentious, arty crowd to which I always (for some dumb reason) aspired, and my two classmates fit in much better with this gang than I did. They were long-haired, hippy-dippy, semi-pretentious and semi-arty girls, long and lean and prone to dancing down our high school’s hallways and draping themselves all over one another (and whoever else was nearby). At times I wanted to be their bff; at other times I wanted them to buzz the eff off.

At any rate, our trip to the retreat was quite fun, and featured much drinking of Snapple and car-dancing/swaying to Led Zeppelin. The song I remember us playing over and over, and singing loudly, was “Fool in the Rain” — a song whose title I somehow didn’t know until today. Huh. Anyway, the road trip was a great one; I felt wonderfully free (of parental control) and cool (with my messed-up perception of cool) and in with the in crowd.

I actually think the semi-pretentious girls ditched me once we got to the retreat, and focused on being fully pretentious with the arty folk, but I remember the retreat itself less than I do the trip to get there. I do recall that my parents came to fetch me at weekend’s end, so there was no chance for our enjoyable car time to be ruined by an exhausting, cranky trip back.

The coda here is that one of those long-haired girls actually died a couple of years ago. I still can’t quite believe that. I mean, we like to moan about how we’re old, but are we really old enough for our high school classmates to start dying? Pretentious as she could be, she was also very beautiful, very kind, and very full of life. Utterly unfair for disease to have taken her so young.

So now, for me, “Fool in the Rain” is both a memory of and a little prayer for KF.