I had a black dress in the spring of 1968 I was very partial to, with a high neck and long, tapered sleeves. The sleeves just about grazed the hem, and every time I wore the dress I was greatly happy to be in Ireland, where my mother in Chicago couldn't see me and suffer the legendary coronary.
Considerately, I saved her life again that summer by not getting walloped with other Vietnam War protesters outside the Democratic Party convention. I watched Mayor Daley's police battering away on a flickering black-and-white telly in a pub, growling "fascist pigs" with the rest. The assumption that I would rather have been there doing my bit for the revolution I left unchallenged.
For the revolution was coming, that was certain. The old order was tottering visibly that spring, rocked by the relentless tramp of our marching feet.
The summer that followed I remember now like the summers of childhood - the sun shone every day and every day was merry. Left was right, and we were privileged to be there, on the right side at the right time in history, with long lives stretching ahead to see that it through.
Heady with such promise, we could afford to be kindly to our elders. So it was in Ireland anyway, where plenty of those who sang The Internationale lustily on Saturday night got up on Sunday morning and headed off to Mass. Out of sight they turned toward the pub, met comrades and read seditious literature.
There was lots of it, ground out in backrooms on the most cumbersome machine since the Guttenberg press, the Gestetner. (Where have all those Gestetners gone - rubbish tips, attics, cubbyholes under the stairs?)
Not everyone was absorbed in actually inciting revolution, of course. In that day just to be young, as has been famously said of France in 1776, was bliss. And although we had no notion of it, this was partly to do with the fact that we were capitalism's prey.
The 1960s were prosperous. Business had its first youth market: the Beatles, Mary Quant, Carnaby Street. Cheeky irreverence was the commercially viable style. By 1968 films were regularly staking out new frontiers: 2001, in one way, The Graduate in quite another. Full frontal nudity came to the legitimate stage with Hair.
But to the young consumers there wasn't much of a chasm between all that and a counter-culture that damned commercial values - flower power, San Francisco, dropping out and tuning in, and most crucially, folk music.
The revival was at its apex. In Dublin, ballad sessions throbbed from the Abbey Tavern in Howth to the Embankment in Tallaght. Guitars were everywhere, including churches. Buoyed up by the Ecumenical Council's promise of "winds of change", all but the most calcified Catholics were praying for a waiver on the birth control rule.
The songs of the poor and powerless became anthems for the future, and the future was naturally the business of the young. Groups with radical views and a young membership mushroomed: Connolly Youth, the Socialist Party of Ireland, Saor Eire, the Irish Communist Organisation; the National Civil Liberties League, the co-op supporters, Comhar Linn and Dochas, Sceim na gCeardchumann.
And there were the students, a rare breed then, vastly outnumbered by their peers in the workforce. But in 1968 they took over the headlines across Europe. As if ignited by a common torch, they began sit-ins and strikes.
In UCD they locked themselves into classrooms, in TCD they demanded an end to the ban on women on campus after midnight, in the art college they went on strike against rigid and fusty outdated standards. Mostly, they were angry about being treated like children, but they were also outraged at the social injustices in the society around them.
Left-wing students dominated, organised in branches of parties or their own organisations: the Republican clubs, Young Socialists, the Internationalists, the Students for Democratic Action.
The largest group was the Labour Party's Universities Branch, whose chairman that year was an architecture student named Ruairi Quinn. He only said what all believed when he wrote in a letter to The Irish Times that the then Labour Party would never achieve what Ireland needed, a socialist workers' republic.
That was the agreed goal. It was also agreed that to get there we had to bury the tired old Civil War politics, and replace them with a genuine left-vs-right struggle. How to do that was the subject of endless passionate argument on innumerable differences of ideology. It was easier to unite on causes elsewhere - opposing apartheid, opposing Vietnam - than to agree on action that would mean something at home.
The answer was the Dublin Housing Action Committee. In the midst of a property speculators' boom there was a cruel shortage of public housing, and slums of O'Casey vintage in places such as Mountjoy Square. By 1968, due to remarkable co-operation of a dozen disparate groups, the DHAC was a mass movement. Thousands came out to march, thronging afterward for speeches delivered from the back of a lorry. A young fellow known as bearla as Frank Ross was in charge of the lorry. THE students were encouraged to take the lead in these marches and did so proudly. As the statute of limitations has now lapsed, I can reveal that this practice was adopted largely to put them first in the line of the police batoncharges. Paris wasn't the only place with class tensions between workers and students.
But Dublin was not Paris, though there were certainly heads bloodied and weekly district court appearances. I recall no slogan to compare with the French students' cry of "We will hang the last capitalist with the entrails of the last bureaucrat". Nor did anyone emulate the Milan students who fired tomatoes at the befurred elite arriving for opening night at La Scala.
Just the same, people in high places were rattled badly. Charlie Haughey called Father Austin Flannery a "gullible priest" for defending the housing protesters. Kevin Boland went one better, denouncing him as a "so-called prelate"; in his reply Father Flannery graciously assumed Mr Boland was didn't actually intend to cast aspersions on his ordination.
Erskine Childers announced indignantly that Fianna Fail was left-of-centre, what was the fuss about? And Dr Browne of Galway, to everyone's hilarious pleasure, declared Trinity College was "a centre of atheist and Communist propaganda".
And then, that August, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which had been quietly mustering numbers, held its first march.
In the autumn, students came back to Queen's and formed People's Democracy, calling for an end to the stalemate of unionist-nationalist politics. I have a clear memory of Bernadette Devlin declaring hotly that they weren't about a united Ireland, but about the civil entitlements of Catholics in the North.
Then came October 5th in Derry, when the civil rights march turned into five days of provoked rioting, and then came the next 30 years.
All in all, it was a bad autumn. To top it off, Humanae Vitae was finally published, more or less declaring that Catholics could have all kinds of change except the only one they wanted. There are two myths about 1968. One is that it was all a deluded exercise fomented by foolish youths, and the second is that most of the foolish got smart and decamped quietly to the other side when they grew up.
As to the first, there was nothing delusory about that extraordinary year. Every few weeks there was new evidence across the western world that greedy, exploitative, unjust systems were collapsing. It was reasonable to hope one more push would do it.
On the second, I recently came across a report of a meeting in Liberty Hall on May 6th, 1968, 30 years ago this week. About 250 people from the varied left-wing student and worker and party groups, all under the requisite age-limit of 25, gathered on a Sunday afternoon in an attempt to find common ground.
After four hours of raging argument, frequent heckling, outbursts of applause and some undiluted rhetoric, they had picked their way through the ideological thicket to a triumphant conclusion. A Council of Youth was formed, committed to uniting "all youth organisations in Ireland to work for the establishment of socialism in this country".
What became of the council I don't know, but I do remember the meeting. A lot of the people who were there are still here, still pushing away, though euphoria has gone with youth. Maybe there is no right time in history. But there's no wrong time either, if you're right.