During my once-a-decade closet-cleaning ritual — where I’d gladly trade filing cabinets and manila folders for a working flame-thrower — I stumbled into a time-warp, without so much as a toothbrush and a change of underwear. It started when I found a savings bond I’d purchased in the first grade. I looked at it and was taken back to 1967, a time when little kids bought savings bonds a stamp at a time. My teacher sold two kinds of stamps: some were a quarter, others a dime. When and if you bought enough you could trade them in for a savings bond that would mature in what seemed to us to be a million years. My classmates and I bought our stamps, filled our cards, and got our bonds at the start of summer. Savings bonds were war bonds – that’s what we were told at home by parents, aunts and uncles who had funded victories over Hitler and Tojo. Patriotism is always good for savings bond sales

My bond is stamped June 9, 1967, and typed on it is the address of the tiny house I lived in back then. I hadn’t seen that address since Lyndon Johnson knocked on the screen of our black-and-white television to tell us he wasn’t as bad as people were saying he was. I stared at the bond, recalling what I now know about June of ’67: Americans dying in Vietnam’s sweltering jungles, Hendrix burning his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival, the full heat of Haight-Ashbury’s drug-fueled Summer of Love. The world was burning a dangerous new path in June of ’67 while my friends and I were safe at home, admiring our crisp, new savings bonds. We were too young and naive to know what was going on around us. We carried cartoon-hero-themed lunchboxes and the only wars we fought were with our siblings. The only revolutions we plotted were to end the "early to bed, early to rise" tyranny. Our world was burning all around us, but we were complacent in the Summer of Charlie Brown. I miss my 1967 — a simple world of friends and family, clear values, and little stamps. As for the other 1967, I missed most of that the first time around, and don’t really miss it now. But I do wish I could’ve seen Hendrix playing just one time, a million years ago in June 1967, when everything around us was red hot and glowing.