Life Expectancy

approached- Thursday, September 15,1994-we worried.
        Mom's coffee consumption went from ten cups a day to twenty.
        She has a curious relationship with caffeine. Instead of fraying her nerves, the brew soothes them.
        If she fails to drink her usual three cups during the morning, by noon she will be as fidgety as a frustrated fly buzzing against a windowpane. If she doesn't pour down eight by bedtime, she lies awake, so mentally active that she not only counts sheep by the thousand but also names them and develops an elaborate life story for each.
        Dad believes that Maddy's topsy-turvy metabolism is a direct result of the fact that her father was a long-haul trucker who ate No-DOz caffeine tablets as if they were candy.
        Maybe so, Mom sometimes answers my father, but what are you complaining about? When we were dating all you had to do was get five or six cheap coffees into me, and I was as pliable as a rubber band.
        As September 15, 1994, drew near, my father's worry expressed itself in fallen cakes, curdled custard, rubbery pie crusts, and creme brulee that had a sandy texture. He could not concentrate on his recipes or his ovens.
        I believe that I handled the anticipation reasonably well. In the last two days leading up to the first of those five ominous dates, I might have walked into more closed doors than usual, might have tripped more often than is customary for me when climbing the stairs. And I do admit to dropping a hammer on Grandma Rowena's foot while trying to hang a picture for her. But it was her foot, not her head, and the one instance when a trip led to a fall, I only tumbled down a single flight of steps and didn't break anything.
        Our worry was kept somewhat in check by the fact that Grandpa Josef had given Dad five "terrible days" in my life, not just one. Obviously, regardless of how grim September 15 might be, I would not die on that day.
        "Yes, but there's always the possibility of severed limbs and mutilation," Grandma Rowena cautioned. "And paralysis and brain damage."
        She is a sweet woman, my maternal grandmother, but one with too sharp a sense of the fragility of life.
        As a child, I had dreaded those occasions when she insisted on reading me to sleep. Even when she didn't revise the classic stories, which she often did, even when the Big Bad Wolf was defeated, as he should have been, Grandma paused at key points in the narrative to muse aloud on the many gruesome things that might have happened to the three little pigs if their defenses had not held or if their strategies had proved faulty. Being ground up for sausages was the least of it.
        And so, less than six weeks after my twentieth birthday, came the first of my five ordeals…

PART TWO
        
    Might as Well Die If I Can't Fly

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        At nine o'clock on the evening of Wednesday, September 14, my parents and I met in their dining room to have as heavy a dinner as we might be able to stand up from without our knees buckling.
        We were also gathered to discuss once more the wisest strategies for getting through the fateful day that lay just three hours ahead of me.
        We hoped that in a prepared and cautious state of mind, I might reach September 16 as unscathed as the three little pigs after their encounter with the wolf.
        Grandma Rowena joined us to speak from the point of view of the wolf.
        That is, she would play the devil's advocate and relate to us what flaws she saw in our precautions.
        As always, we took dinner on gold-rimmed Raynaud Limoges china, using sterling-silver flatware by Buccellati.
        In spite of what the table setting suggests, my parents are not wealthy, just securely middle class. Although my father makes a fine salary as a pastry chef, stock options and corporate jets don't come with his position.
        My mother earns a modest income working part-time from home, painting pet portraits on commission: mostly cats and dogs, but also rabbits, parakeets, and once a r^nilk snake that came to pose and didn't want to leave.
        Their small Victorian house would be called humble if it weren't so cozy that it feels sumptuous. The ceilings are not high and the proportions of the rooms are not grand, but they have been furnished with great care and with an eye to comfort You can't blame Earl for taking refuge behind the living-room sofa, under the claw-foot tub in the