(FORTUNE Magazine) – Whether by honest conviction or dire necessity, we'd become a pair of capitalists, even if one of us was out of work. Not filthy rich, not even plump with prosperity, but our minds fixed on money, the market, and the uncertainty of tomorrow.

You get that way. By age 50, Orwell wrote, a man has the face he deserves, and Barry Pearl will know in a year whether justice has been done. He is as middle class as middle class gets. Stockbroker, Cadillac Catera driver, Atlanta suburbanite with a taste for ribs: He consumes conspicuously if not ostentatiously.

But all of us navigating through middle age had a former life, and remembrance of a time past was on Pearl's mind when his daughter, Danielle, turned 16. Sixteen? Why, wasn't 1968 only yesterday? His wife showed me a picture of him circa '68. Hair down to his waist. Ready for the revolution.

On his daughter's birthday, Pearl might have made a big splash. He might have thrown a party and given her the keys to a cherry Miata. Instead his gift was more modest and more personal. He took her to dinner and gave her a CD--The Essential Bob Dylan, on the Columbia label.

"I wanted her to hear the music that meant something to me when I was young and radical," he was telling me. We're accustomed to seeing our parents only as adults, never as young people, much less as children. He laughs gently. His daughter never knew he'd been "sort of a Jerry Rubin figure."

The two of us were out on the town, neither young nor old and certainly not radical, and settled on a Mexican place. Steve McElroy was doing his Friday night guitar gig--the Eagles, "American Pie," the occasional Jimmy Buffett--at U.S. Border Brewery & Cantina in Alpharetta, Ga. Pearl, I'd heard, was a guitarist as well as a radical, but he disavowed it. "To say you were a guitarist implies a level of accomplishment I could not claim," he said. Okay, so he played around on the guitar, like our sons.

I took out a slip of paper and scribbled a couple of requests for the man at the microphone. I'd have requested the Eagles' "Lying Eyes" if Pearl hadn't jogged my memory to the decade before. I've never taken to the idea that our lives are like tangerines to be peeled apart in ten-year wedges. But the Eagles were the '70s, and I was trying to summon up the '60s. "What was that Dylan song?" I asked. "'I ain't saying you treated me unkind/You could have done better, but I don't mind/You just sorta wasted my precious time...'"

The guitar man strummed a few bars and sang:

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn, Look out your window and I'll be gone, You're the reason I'm travelin' on, Don't think twice, it's all right.

Nothing much about revolution or social justice, just the wistful echo of emotions men keep on a short leash. It's a cliche that men are uncomfortable with the language of introspection, but no less true for that. In our silence, we throw ourselves into work and come, after a while, to accept who we are by accepting what we will never be. "You live and you yearn," Joseph Epstein wrote self-mockingly in an essay titled "An Older Dude."

That's us, all right. Dads are older dudes if not yet old sticks. We'll get there too, with any luck, and the house will be paid off, the kids will be on their own, and we won't have the zip to drive the BMW M5 we wished the staid Cadillac had been. That, too, will be all right. It'll have to be.

Far from leading a revolution, we will have acquired, among other things, an inventory of material possessions. They will bring their own satisfaction, tangible evidence that we hadn't done badly. Had done, in fact, pretty well. But every now and then the music that never died plays in our breast, and the young person we once were appears before our eyes. Our kids might not recognize him, but we know him well. It's good seeing him again, however briefly.