When my mother claims that “my own kind has betrayed me,” she means women, generally, and me, specifically. Between us yawns a gap not just of a generation but of a social revolution. My mother was content to be a housewife; I — computer literate, liberal-to-left, educated — celebrate the achievements women have made during my lifetime and believe in the flexibility and potential of feminist politics. In my mother’s eyes, however, feminism has, at best, abandoned her; at worst, it has actively hunted her down.

Last week I picked up the Poughkeepsie Journal in a luncheonette near Vassar. Over coffee I started to read a piece by an actor titled “The Actor’s Mind.” Fine, I thought, tell me something about acting. But here is how the thing opened: “As a young man in high school facing my future I only knew one career I didn’t want. And that was a schoolteacher’s.”

The phone rang, echoing down the long hallway. I froze, listening. It stopped in the middle of the third ring, and a few seconds later I heard heavy footsteps coming my way. I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, the springs and frame squeaking loudly. I stared at the scarred door. Feet scraped to a stop just outside it. Then there were three loud knocks, and a deep male voice demanded, “Are you Fred Hill?”

Our decision to educate our children at home grew out of circumstance as much as ideology. We lived a long way from the school, and the bus wandered many miles to pick up all the rural children. Getting to school, going to class, and getting home again would have taken our children twelve hours. We weren’t willing to commit them to that long a day.

What does it mean to love the earth, to love it in its unglamorous particulars, to get close to the sweet stink of our decay, the armpit of the world and its asshole? The planet isn’t real for me. It’s too big, too abstract. What’s real is the street I live on, the sky outside my window, the middle-aged man in the mirror still fighting a battle over whether to eat one more cookie.