In the past few days, living on campus over the summer suddenly became slightly more interesting. Market Street has played host to two buses that look like the they’ve been constructed in Tommy Chong’s garage for the sole purpose of hauling two parties of just-missed-the-sixties Grateful Dead Fans home to the promised land. On Saturday night, when I was walking back to Graham, I saw both bus groups joined together on the corner of Alviso and Market, sitting in a circle and singing together. Ken Kesey was tripping in his grave. I realized that reunions are a fascinating re-enactments of everyday life in the past. It wasn’t an exact replica. These people didn’t remember every detail and stitch of their everyday moments, so even for them it must be a bit like looking through a very convincing wax-figure diorama behind glass. But for someone who didn’t live it, that’s the best I have to understand it. A museum. A living museum.

My parents are in town this weekend and I heard myself say that phrase several times over the weekend, and every time the fellow college-student listening to me would give a look of understanding a much wordier story. It’s always a reunion with your life from the past. The tragic fact that only became clear this weekend is the one that I now see is the hardest for a parent to accept. For eighteen years, they’re a major part of just about every single day of your life, and then one day they’re not. It’s gotta be a pretty hard damn day. We, the younger half, get the easier deal. We turn around from saying goodbye to the person or people who have been the most well known in our life, and run our faces smack right into thousands of other faces that look a bit like our face and even talk a bit like us, and the faces say things we can connect to take interest in so they take up our time and headspace and carry us off into a new life. Our parents, on the other hand, turn back around to find faces they have loved, but fewer.

We can learn a lot from our parents. I don’t even mean this as stitched-pillow platitude. I mean collectively, this crazy population known as youth can be educated as a whole people. The intergenerational relationship holds a good deal of weight in how the world works. We are molded by those who raise us, and by extension, the time period and culture that nurtured them. A generation watches it’s shared and proverbial child grow up under their guidance and control, then one day feel the back of the t-shirt slip out of its hands, and they will know that the world is about to change. We’re always waiting for the kids to grow up.

The people who run the world of the privileged college attendee are all about our parents’ age. They get dressed up for work and do a good deal of sitting in chairs. To be fair, we do a good amount of the same, especially anyone with an on-campus job. And our windsor-knot parental generation remembers how hard their parents scrapped to rebuild the world after war tried to destroy it, how living in fear takes its hold and tightens people’s grip on their security. And our parents were young in a crucial time. The world took off and every inch of it started beaming to every other inch through television screens and cell phones and the internet. It started being a Crazy Time to Be Alive all the time, but then our parents got older and had children and felt reason to be both afraid of and afraid for the world.

I remember being six years old and laying in my parents’ bed at 6:30 in the morning being clutched by my mom, watching smoke billow from New York and my dad’s voice from the phone asking “are you okay?” I remember coming home from school to my dad sitting in the living room telling me he’d been let go and I remember a year’s worth of news stations reporting on the collapse of the American Dream. And I will always remember what those moments made me feel. As I grow older a more organic and continual understanding begins to bloom. I begin to understand how those moments affected the ones who were worrying more about me in those times than themselves. That constant beating organ of a memory will propel our generation forward, as the question of whether or not to emulate our creators becomes cemented somewhere near our brain stem.

Forgive my trite proclamation that this is a hell of a time to be alive and allow me to marvel at what has happened in the past two weeks. A tragedy struck the community of Charleston and tore deep at the hearts of many people across the country, but the city unified and transcended the senseless violence. Equal right to marry the person whom one loves has been granted to every American. And the Grateful Dead are playing in the Bay Area. I’ve found it hard not to feel a bit joyful in the excitement of what’s going on, and I hope that we don’t allow it to pass along as a week-long convergence of Facebook sharing and newscasts.

Let’s have this time move our generation forward, into adulthood and a new age of Radical and Revolutionary, where we look toward bringing love into our lives and progress into the life of all people. Let’s blow the doors off of adulthood, so that by the time we’re putting the happiness of someone else before our own, we’ve been made vulnerable and grown strong. When we get there, we’ll be both ready and completely unprepared, and we’re just gonna have to let them take it up on their shoulders, let go of the back of their shirt and trust.

I may just speak for myself, but I’ll be happy if a few decades from now, a 20-year old kid is walking home on his campus and wonders why a group of people are sitting in a circle on a street corner with a MacBook.