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displacement by punk rock and Reaganomics—all had something to do with it. I hate to think that personal development, with its template of idiosyncrasies, can be reduced to explanations as simple as “it was the times,” but the sixties counterculture—along with its alter ego, eighties greed—has imprinted itself all over me.
    Even so, I wasn’t raised by some wasted, crazed hippie parents who smoked pot in Central Park while carrying me in a tie-dyed Snugli, took me to Woodstock at age two, and by virtue of their reckless postadolescent irresponsibility, managed to screw me up but good. Nothing could be further from the truth. My mom was a die-hard Republican who voted for Nixon three times, who wanted them to escalate the Vietnam War effort, and who went to see William F. Buckley speak while she was an undergraduate at Cornell in the early sixties. As she tells it, so few students at the liberal college she attended showed up at the lecture that she threw her coat across several seats to make it look as if more were coming. (My mom, by the way, is the only person I know at this point who thinks Oliver North is a hero.) My dad was apolitical, had absolutely no professional aspirations, and worked as a low-level employee at a large corporation. He had short hair and wore Buddy Holly nerd glasses, read Isaac Asimov, and listened to Tony Bennett. The closest thing we ever had to a political discussion was sometime when I was about eight and he told me it was crappy of President Ford to pardon Nixon because lying was really bad. Basically, my parents had no unconventional tendencies, though they occasionally bought bad Mary Travers albums.
    My parents, like the progenitors of most people my age, were not those freewheeling, footloose and fancy-free baby boomers who made the sixties happen. They were just an itty bit too old for that, born in 1939 and 1940 instead of 1944 and 1945 (in an accelerated culture, five years makes a world of difference). For the most part, the parents of my contemporaries were done with college and had moved onto the workaday world by the early sixties, several years before the campus uprisings, the antiwar activities, and the emerging sex-drugs-rock-and-roll culture had become a pervasive force.
    By the time the radical sixties hit their home bases, we, the kids, were already born, and our parents found themselves stuck between an entrenched belief that children needed to be raised in a traditional household, and a new sense that anything was possible, that the alternative lifestyle was out there for the asking. There they were, in marriages they once thought were a necessity and with children they’d had almost by accident in a world that was suddenly saying,
No necessities! No accidents! Drop everything!
A little too old to take full advantage of the cultural revolution, our parents just got all the fallout. Freedom hit them obliquely, and invidiously, rather than head on. Instead of waiting longer to get married, our parents got divorced; instead of becoming feminists, our mothers were left to become displaced homemakers. A lot of unhappy situations were dissolved by people who were not quite young or free (read: childless) enough to start again. And their discontent, their stuck-ness, was played out on their children. Sharing kids with a person you have come to despise must be a bit like getting caught in a messy car wreck and then being forced to spend the rest of your life paying visits to the paraplegic in the other vehicle: You are never allowed to forget your mistake.
    My parents are a perfect case in point. Lord knows whatever possessed them to get married in the first place. It probably had something to do with the fact that my mom was raised with many of her first cousins, and all of them were getting married, so it seemed like the thing to do. And from her point of view, back in the early sixties, marriage was the only way she could get out of her