This was San Francisco in the seventies, where another kind of
haunting was also taking place. The 1960’s had come and gone while I was
a little girl, and now there were just the dregs to remember them by:
addled hippies in rainbow-knit caps playing bongos in Golden Gate park,
smells of pot and incense wafting in the air, and a deep stillness to
the city, as if it were slowly coming to after a sharp conk on the head.
In that stillness I could almost hear the echoes of the wild parade I’d
barely missed. At times it seemed more real to me than my own life.…