I don't visit Berkeley. And the aversion's inherited - after earning a doctorate in sociology from the university there, my father doesn't go there, either. Nor did he spend much time discussing it while I was growing up, despite his past as a former radical and his present as a cog in the capitalist machine.

My impressions of Berkeley, like those of most nonresidents, were still colored by that history he was loath to talk about: naked people on Telegraph Avenue, long-haired stoners wandering around on campus.

He said it has changed. "I feel like a tourist there now," he grumbled.

"Maybe we should check it out, then," I said, and so we did.

While we were driving on the freeway, he explained to me why he didn't spend much time near his old college stomping grounds, despite being right down the road in San Jose.

Growing up in a rough Southern California neighborhood, my dad first came to Berkeley in 1966 as an "18-year-old intellectual tourist." He was inspired by snippets he saw as a kid on the evening news - Mario Savio and the free speech movement, Bettina Aptheker and the Communist Party USA. It took him an additional five years of community and state college, draft registration, and hard work to get to UC Berkeley for graduate school in 1971, by which point the bloom was already off the rose of the protest movement, even if he didn't know it then.

"One of the things about being in your teens and your 20s, I thought Berkeley would always be the same," he said. "I really thought it would always be a center of youth radicalism."

It's not anymore, of course.

We walked up Shattuck Avenue and stopped in front of Chez Panisse. As we studied the menus posted outside, my father mentioned that Alice Waters was just launching her "food revolution" around the same time he came to Berkeley.

"We all sneered at her," he said. "We didn't think there was anything radical about getting Americans to eat more vegetables."

I wanted to ask him more about that. I had never heard anything about the connection between the student movement and the nascent food movement; had never thought about the now-obvious thread that connected gentle Alice Waters with the tear gas at Sproul Plaza and the hollow-point bullets of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

But at that moment, my father and I were interrupted by a well-aged, well-dressed couple descending the stairs of Chez Panisse, aglow with the pleasures of their lunchtime albacore tuna tartare, their sherbet and mint parfait made with Lucero Farms strawberries. A white van had just pulled up outside the restaurant, advertising Cowgirl Creamery's "artisan and farmstead" cheeses, and the woman couldn't contain herself.

"Oh, my gawd," she shrieked, running forward to clasp the hands of the startled-looking man descending from the van. "You guys are my favorites. Can I come to your operation? Can I see the goats?"

As the man gently explained to her that the creamery uses cow milk to make its cheeses, my dad continued his Alice Waters story without prompting.

"Yeah, we used to make fun of her," he said. "But as far as revolutions go, we lost. She won."

Dad also showed me the places of his contributions to the old cause - the dingy corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, where he used to buy copies of Mao's little red book from the Black Panther Party. The bald grass knoll just above Sproul Plaza, where everyone would congregate to smoke weed and shout abuse at the campus police. The empty Revolution Books, where I bought a $2 copy of "Dancing With Cuba: A Memoir of the Revolution." My dad bantered with the bored clerk about what kind of Marxism she'd be teaching to kids on a summer bus tour.

"Bob Avakian's teachings are really better at connecting with people than the old Marxist-Leninist stuff," the clerk insisted. She couldn't have been younger than 60, and clearly hadn't left Berkeley very often since the good old days. As they stood there debating, I imagined them as young people on campus - thinner and hipper, but still debating the same unanswered questions in a small dark room with the faint smell of weed hovering in the air.

"Christ," I said as we walked out. "Is that what you did all day? It doesn't seem like much fun."

"It wasn't," he said. "Idealism recedes as you get older."

And that, if anything, is what I picked up on while growing up - that sad sense of a moment passed, a mission aborted. My father continued to try changing the world in his own way, through teaching.

But by staying quiet about the old times, he let me come to my own conclusions about activism, and the main conclusion I came to was that I needed to find a way to make a difference from the sidelines. In time, I'm sure I'll learn that this choice, too, offers disappointments.