Any number of reasons including how I’d arrived in the parking lot of the Lake Merritt BART station dressed in a suit, appropriate wear for my bank job, had to look professional inside a cubicle while young kids my same age dressed in Mardi Gras feathers, beads, and tie-died everything, drifted happily through the sweet-smelling smoke; couldn’t go even if I wanted to, didn’t have tickets, and certainly not the right clothes, too late anyway because the crowd moved across the street as I stood there with my car keys
disparaging Dionysian maenads wearing nose rings and pulling backpacks on snow sleds across the street to the Beaux Arts Auditorium, felt I’d missed out on the events of my generation, when I’d been there all the time, but not in a counter-culture sort of way; never against culture, which was somebody’s made-up name, felt the revolution around the corner had serious side effects while these dead-heads were flowers falling in the street and getting high in the stands, while I worked for the Bank of America holding my car keys trying to find my way out of it
remembering digging ditches in the baked limestone of Los Naranjos, an international city 30 miles northwest of Habana, stood at Union Square collecting signatures for third-party candidates, carried protest signs along Fifth Avenue, body-searched in a courtroom designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, swam in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with those who’d had their lives destroyed by Senator McCarthy, men who told stories about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and organizing the AFL-CIO, and as I stood there holding my car keys, I wondered how all that had brought me to working on a computer designing instructions for tellers about ATM machines?