Have you ever gone to a party that transports you back in time? I’ve attended two in one week, in Santa Monica, California, and Washington, D.C. I’m missing the ’60s of my childhood something awful.

Time trips took me to Madison, Wisconsin, and Harlem in New York, where our family and friends were making America anew. Those are places where we knew the Zeitlins and the Seabrooks.

The ’60s spirit is very different from the way we live now in vengeful Donald Trump’s America.

Even as young children, we captured the zeitgeist of dissent, folk songs and rock ‘n’ roll, civil rights marches and anti-war protests with our parents. We wept at assassinations that made no sense. The miraculous moon landing is carved on collective memory, as a summer of ’69 finale to all that.

Note: children in the ’60s, not children of the ’60s. Woodstock was way past our bedtimes.

Maurice Zeitlin, a dashing professor of sociology, lived four doors down from us in University Houses in Madison.

My grandparents disapproved of our friend, the campus radical. Maurice interviewed the revolutionary Che Guevara in Cuba for hours until daybreak. Maurice’s work on Cuba’s blueprint for a revolution is classic.

Going to his 90th birthday fest on the beachfront wasn’t something to miss. My father and Maurice both moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, so the bonds were unbroken. You can’t make new old friends.

In Madison, Maurice became a leading voice in the anti-Vietnam War movement with an electric eloquence that moved hearts and minds. The shocking police beating of student protesters caused the movement to spread to other college campuses from the heartland.

David Maraniss wrote a book set in October 1967, its narrative spanning University of Wisconsin unrest and the raging war in Vietnam: “They Marched Into Sunlight.”

Maurice’s writer wife, Marilyn, and their three daughters were the most expressive family we knew.

I, also one of three daughters, loved running through the open fields and forest around us, with no play dates.

But we kids did put on a play, “Snow White.” Michelle Zeitlin, a dancer and performer, never forgot I gave the lead role to the girl next door, Jane. Her mother, Polly, was my piano teacher.

With a community garden and children growing, it was like living in a Midwest faculty kibbutz, my father said.

A symphonygoer, yet he enjoyed Maurice’s granddaughter Devin, who fronts a band named Honey Revenge, singing a pop punk song, her pink hair blowing in the wind.

Tributes paid homage to a fiery figure who changed lives. Michelle asked me to say a few words about Madison days in the California sun.

“We learned right from wrong as children. We knew the government was lying to us,” about the war, I said.

The first generation to learn a hard lesson.

Never let Republicans taint the creative ferment and social change of the ’60s. See the Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown.” They were vivid times to be alive. John F. Kennedy changed everything — in life and death.

My parents became friends with Patricia and Luther Seabrook when we all lived in public housing on 125th Street. They had a baby girl, Kelly, my age. We shared a sitter.

“Cribmate!” Kelly greeted me at Grand Central Station. We wore green for her mother’s funeral on St. Patrick’s Day. You can’t get much closer.

Pat, a vibrant redhead from Brooklyn; Luther, a black man from South Carolina. His exuberant Gullah manner of speaking filled a room. He loved to recite the poem, “Who Has Seen the Wind?”

They were training to be educators, and both made a mark. Like the Seabrooks, my parents were at Columbia, as a medical resident and Ph.D. candidate.

Pat rose to be the first woman head of the Manhattan high schools. Her elegant handwriting signed off, “Love and Kisses,” which meant more than Waterford crystal.

Their younger daughter, Linda, worked as a Justice Department lawyer. She gave a farewell party in an industrial space, an old brewery, with a throng of cool pals.

“The people have spoken,” she said. A loss.

Our old friends lived in the vanguard, breaking ’50s boundaries. As kids, that’s just the way things were — then.

JamieStiehm.com