Member-only story
About Me — Dino Alonso
Reader, Writer, Thinker, Uniter
I’ve lived a lot of lives.
When people ask where I’m from, my instinct is to pause. The answer depends on how you measure it: geography, culture, or the sheer variety of experience. I was born in San Francisco in the 1960s, an era when the air was thick with hope, rebellion, and the faint aroma of patchouli. The “Human Be-In” and the “Summer of Love” weren’t just historical events to me; they were the wallpaper of my childhood. Peace, love, and hope were imprinted into my DNA before I could spell “metaphor.”
And then, like a leaf caught in a crosswind, I moved — a lot. My mother, the original nomad, relocated six times before I was born, setting the stage for my own whirlwind upbringing. By the time I hit double digits, I had racked up addresses like frequent flyer miles: three years in San Juan, soaking in the Caribbean’s sun-drenched beauty, and a year in the UK, where I stumbled into my first romance (I was 10, and she had braces — it was doomed from the start). Phoenix, Arizona, followed, a desert landscape as dry as my teenage sarcasm. My adolescence played out like a reel of That ’70s Show, except my bell-bottoms were real, not retro.
But let’s rewind to San Francisco in 1979. I’d returned to the city for college, ready to dive into academia, only to find the waters…
