I was born the year The Feminine Mystique was published. My mom was a college student/artist/bohemian, and my dad was almost the same sans bohemian. He was more of a barbarian (his own view, voiced many times over with a chuckle). They raised me to be me. To follow my path, to explore my life, to make mistakes, to succeed, to love, to embrace, to know that no matter what, the key was getting up after a fall and just moving on. I watched my friends living much more conservative and traditional American lives at that point, that is to say that they were living a consumer-driven version of the American Dream. Cooked up by the media, and our reaction to the horrors of WWII. While observing the differences between my life and my friends', I often felt conspicuously different, like a wild child growing up in Victorian England. We ate homemade whole grain bread. We had chickens (in the middle of the city, that lived in a frame/stucco chicken coop my Dad had built that was bette...