Cherry Valley, N.Y.

MY parents were not hippies. We were a deeply conventional, middle-class American family, but my clean-cut mother and father tried to embrace, in a haphazard and innocent way, the values of the counterculture — at least enough to send me, their moody 14-year-old daughter, alone on a four-week bike trip through Greece.

My parents always approached my sister and me with an open-mindedness that was part idealism and part indulgence. So even when we were tiny, they let us stay up with the adults. We drifted off to sleep on various laps amid the murmur of late-night conversation. We attended an experimental school that, in sixth grade, gave us the option of studying math or doing book reports. (To this day, I don’t really understand fractions.) We were the only ones in our suburban neighborhood who ate brown bread and made yogurt.

My housewife mother was never without makeup and high heels, but she wanted to be sure I was raised with the hard-won feminist insistence on limitless possibility. So we listened to Marlo Thomas’s record “Free to Be You and Me,” her effort to instill women’s lib in the coming generation.

Later, we sang along to Carole King and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” My sister and I would perform the entire rock opera during car rides on our summer vacations.