I had forgotten what burning marijuana smells like. Smoke gives me a headache, and I knew one too many friends who did one too many joints and stayed high and spacey even when they weren’t, so I never tried it, even in Berkeley in the late 1960s, when grass was as common as grass. Yet I couldn’t walk ten feet through the crowd at Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park without catching a whiff of a sweet scent I recognized from another place, another time. After a while, I remembered what it was.

    That was the only familiar memory that afternoon. I missed San Francisco’s most psychedelic season entirely; I spent the break between the 1967 and 1968 academic years working in the Cosmic Ray Laboratory under Bridge Hall at CalTech, where I was about to be a senior. Yet I did know there was a world outside: I read about it in the newspapers! And there were a few regulars at the Museum, the coffee house in Pasadena where I folk danced, who qualified as hippies, in sort of a yuppie upper-class wealthy-suburb-of-Los-Angeles kind of way.

    I moved to Berkeley the next summer, for grad school, and have resided in or near the Bay Area since. Yet I don’t believe I visited the Haight-Ashbury more than two or three times in the twentieth century, and except for the California Academy of Science, I didn’t get to Golden Gate Park at all until a few years ago.

    So when I saw Internet postings about a free festival commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, it was as much whimsy and a free afternoon on Labor Day weekend that prompted me to go.  That, and the music.

    I can’t tell you I was a closet rock-and-roll fan because I wasn’t. My friends all raved about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and I have never been able to stand either group. Yet I respected the judgment of my peers and concluded that since these two bands were at the top of the heap, everything else must be even more terrible, so the entire genre wasn’t worth listening to. It was decades before I discovered that my taste in music was as weird as my taste in everything else, and that my particular heap has the Beatles and the Stones way at the bottom. So I sort of drifted through the musical climate of my academic years, hearing an occasional tune on car radio or through somebody’s window as I walked to and from class.

    I took the train from Palo Alto into downtown San Francisco, then made my way to the outskirts of the park by streetcar and bus. From my stop it was a twenty-minute walk to the festival, via narrow, shaded woodland trails just inside the park boundary. There was no problem finding the site: After a few hundred yards, I started hearing occasional thumps of percussion, then bass tones, until finally I had the full audio spectrum to home in on.

    Speedway Meadow is a small valley, elongated east to west, a bit west of the center of the park. Steep slopes and trees border it on all sides, giving shelter from the wind and encouraging the warmth of the sun to linger. There was a giant stage set up at the west end, with sound equipment loud enough to be heard a mile away. The half of the meadow nearest the stage was given over entirely to open-air seating. The rest of the area had rows of booths, very Renaissance-Fairesy, selling food and trinkets, espousing western causes and eastern religions: There were enchiladas and ecocentrism ... hummus and Hare Krishnas ... Buddhas and buttons. I bought one of the latter that said “Coexist”, with the letters formed from the symbols of major religions and movements: The ‘C’ was the crescent of Islaam, the ‘o’ a peace symbol, the ‘x’ a Star of David, and the ‘t’ a Christian cross. Very 1960s. I didn’t get anything to eat — the food was too pricey — very Renaissance Faire, indeed.

    The crowd was a motley bunch. High-school kids in summery cottons mingled with grizzled elders who had actually been there. A few identifiable tourists wandered in bewilderment, taking pictures of everything. There were neat costumes. One bare-chested man had covered his hair, beard and mustache entirely with small flowers in diverse colors. He could have stepped out of a poster for flower children. “If you go to San Francisco / Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair ...”.

    I couldn’t get close enough to the stage to hear the music well, and there were problems with the sound system, so mostly I hung around near the back of the booth area, people-watching and listening casually. Notwithstanding, there was some memorable music: Jefferson Starship was there, with a female lead vocalist with much the same voice quality as Grace Slick, belting out “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love”, much as it must have been. How tingly to hear this music live, on location, even forty years after the fact.

    Later I took a bus into the Haight-Ashbury area, and ate yummy dinner at a favorite restaurant that does Eritrean cuisine. Then I went home, feeling that a notable gap in my memories had at last gotten something put into it. Who knows, I may yet qualify as a member of my own generation.