Life Expectancy

upstairs bath, in a clothes hamper, in the pantry potato basket, and elsewhere during the three interesting weeks that he adopted us. Earl was the milk snake, and the home from which he'd come was a sterile place with stainless-steel-and-black-leather furniture, abstract art, and cactuses for house plants.
        Of all the charming corners in this small house where you might read a book, listen to music, or gaze out a many-paned window at a be-jeweled winter day, none is as welcoming as the dining room. This is because to the Tock family, food-and the conviviality that marks our every meal-is the hub that turns the spokes that spin the wheel of life.
        Therefore, the luxury of Limoges and Buccellati.
        Considering that we are incapable of pulling up a chair to any dinner with less than five courses and that we regard the first four, in which we fully indulge, as mere preparation for the fifth, it is miraculous that none of us is overweight.
        Dad once discovered that his best wool suit had grown tight in the waist. He merely skipped lunch three days, and the pants were then loose on him.
        Mom's caffeine tolerance is not the most significant curiosity regarding our unusual relationship to food. Both sides of the family, the Tock side and the Greenwich side (Greenwich being my mother's maiden name), have metabolisms as efficient as that of a hummingbird, a creature which can eat three times its body weight each day and remain light enough to fly.
        Mom once suggested that she and my father had been instantly attracted to each other in part because of a subliminal perception that they were metabolic royalty.
        The dining room features a coffered mahogany ceiling, mahogany wainscoting, and a mahogany floor. Silk moire walls and a Persian carpet soften all the wood.
        There is a blown-glass chandelier with pendant crystals, but dinner is always served by candlelight.
        On this special night in September of 1994, the candles were numerous and squat, set in small but not shallow cut-crystal bowls, some clear and others ruby-red, which fractured the light into soft prismatic patterns on the linen tablecloth, on the walls, and on our faces.
        Candles were placed not only on the table but also on the sideboards.
        Had you glanced in through a window, you might have thought not that we were at dinner but that we were conducting a seance, with food provided to keep us entertained until at last the ghosts showed up.
        Although my parents had prepared my favorite dishes, I tried not to think of it as the condemned man's last meal.
        Five properly presented courses cannot be eaten on the same schedule as a McDonald's Happy Meal, especially not with carefully chosen wines. We were prepared for a long evening together.
        Dad is the head pastry chef for the world-famous Snow Village Resort, a position he inherited from his father, Josef. Because all breads and pastries must be fresh each day, he goes to work at one o'clock in the morning at least five and often six days a week. By eight, with the baking for the entire day complete, he comes home for breakfast with Mom, then sleeps until three in the afternoon.
        That September, I also worked those hours because I had been an apprentice baker for two years at the same resort. The Tock family believes in nepotism.
        Dad says it's not really nepotism if your talent is real. Give me a good oven, and I am a wicked competitor.
        Funny, but I am never clumsy in a kitchen. When baking, I am Gene Kelly, I am Fred Astaire, I am grace personified.
        Dad would be going from our late dinner to work, but I would not. In preparation for the first of the five days in Grandpa Josef's prediction, I had taken a week's vacation.
        Our starter course was sou bourek, an Armenian dish. Numerous paper-thin layers of pasta are separated by equally thin layers of butter and cheese, finished with a golden crust.
        I still lived with my folks in those days, so Dad said, "You should stay home from midnight to midnight. Hide out. Nap, read, watch a little TV."
        "Then what'll happen," Grandma Rowena imagined, "is that he'll fall down the stairs and break his neck."
        "Don't use the stairs," Mom advised. "Stay in your room, honey. I can bring your meals to you."
        "So then the house will burn down," Rowena said.
        "Now, Weena, the house won't burn