The road to Afghanistan from London had led across a Turkey still impenetrable, where only the children smiled, the shah’s Iran, where Mashhad’s cobalt blue mosque made an indelible impression, and the dusty border near Herat, where we first became acquainted with the pride of the Afghan gaze.

Our VW Kombi was called Pigpen, named after the keyboardist of the Grateful Dead who’d died that year. The Dead loomed large, our sunshine daydream. “Truckin”’ was our anthem — until the cassette machine got stolen. Then we strained for the harmonies of “Uncle John’s Band.” In Kabul we had an Ace of Hearts painted on the front of Pigpen.

Up to Bamiyan we went and sat on the heads of the 1,500-year-old Buddhas, since destroyed by the Taliban as “gods of the infidels.” We gazed at the sacred valley. The peace seemed eternal; it would not be. Everything passes except the dream that it will not. In Band-e-Amir, the night sky was of a breathtaking brilliance. On my 18th birthday, I thought I found my star, blotted out the rest, and recalled the line from “Box of Rain” — “Maybe you’ll find direction around some corner where it’s been waiting to meet you.” Later, deep in the Hindu Kush, Pigpen broke down. Like so many before us, we limped out of Afghanistan but we brought the Kombi home. There is much to be said for journeys without maps.

So of course I had to resume the journey earlier this month at Soldier Field in Chicago, where the Grateful Dead sans Jerry Garcia regrouped on their 50th anniversary to bid farewell. I’d last seen them on a Haight-Ashbury pilgrimage in San Francisco in 1974. Well, we’d all changed. Peace signs had not won the day any more than time’s imprint could be effaced. A cynic would take the view that the dollar sign had prevailed. But the magic of the music, in its moments of improvised brilliance, precluded any such heartless reflection. Hugs and hopes of old and young filled the stadium. Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart still did their thing. Listen to “Friend of the Devil” and find yourself back on the road from Herat to Kandahar — four decades, a mere ripple on water.

A Palestinian friend and physician, Sahar Halabi, attended the concert with me. Her odyssey had taken her from Algiers to Liverpool and on to the Midwest. Later, she sent me something she had once written about her search for her family’s home, from which they were ousted in 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence, which Palestinians call their “Nakba,” or catastrophe.