Life Expectancy

centipede pillow.
        Mom sat at the easel in her alcove and worked on a portrait of a collie whose owner wanted it portrayed in a checkered neck scarf and cowboy hat.
        Considering my life and the dinner just enjoyed, I naturally gave some thought to eccentricity. As I write about the Tock clan, its members seem odd and singular. Which they are. Which is one reason why I love them.
        Every family is eccentric in its own way, however, as is each human being. Like the Tocks, they have their tics.
        Eccentric means off or aside from the ordinary, off or aside from what is considered normal. As a civilization, through consensus, we agree on what is normal, but this consensus is as wide as a river, not as narrow as the high wire above a big top.
        Even so, not one of us lives a perfectly normal, ordinary life in every regard. We are, after all, human beings, each of us unique to an extent that no member of any other species is different from others of its kind.
        We have instinct but we are not ruled by it. We feel the pull of the mindless herd, the allure of the pack, but we resist the extreme effects of this influence-and when we do not, we drag our societies down into the bloody wreckage of failed Utopias, led by Hitler or Lenin, or Mao Tse-tung. And the wreckage reminds us that God gave us our individualism and that to surrender it is to follow a dark path.
        When we fail to see the eccentricities in ourselves and to be amused by them, we become monsters of self-regard. Each in its own way, every family is as eccentric as mine. I guarantee it. Opening your eyes to this truth is to open your heart to humanity.
        Read Dickens; he knew.
        Those in my family don't wish to be anyone but who they are. They will not edit themselves to impress others.
        They find meaning in their quiet faith, in one another, and in the little miracles of their daily lives. They don't need ideologies or philosophies to define themselves. They are defined by living, with all senses engaged, with hope, and with a laugh ever ready.
        Almost from the moment I had met her in the library, I had known that Lorrie Lynn Hicks knew everything that Dickens knew, whether she had read him or not. Her beauty lay less in her physical appearance than in the fact that she wasn't a Freudian automaton and would never allow herself to be defined by those terms; she was nobody's victim, nobody's fool. She was motivated not by what others had done to her, not by envy, not by a conviction of moral superiority, but by life's possibilities.
        I put aside the novel featuring the Elephant Man detective, and I levered myself up from the armchair, into the walker. The wheels squeaked faintly.
        In the kitchen, I closed the door behind myself and went to the wall phone.
        For a while I stood there, blotting my damp palms on my shirt.
        Trembling. This nervousness was less acute but more profound than anything I'd felt while under Punchinello's gun.
        This was the trepidation of a climber who wishes to scale the world's highest mountain in record time, who knows that for a certain window of his life he will have the skills and the physical resources to achieve his dream, but who fears that bureaucrats or storms, or fate, will foil him until his window closes. And then who will he be, what will he become?
        During the six weeks since the night of the clowns, we had spoken by phone many times. I had committed her number to memory.
        I keyed in three digits, hung up.
        My mouth had gone dry. I squeaked to a cabinet, got a drinking glass, squeaked to the sink. I drew chilled and filtered water from the special tap.
        Eight ounces heavier but still with a dry mouth, I returned to the phone.
        I keyed in five digits, hung up.
        I didn't trust my voice. I practiced: "Hi, it's Jimmy."
        Even I had given up calling myself James. When you realize you're fighting a fundamental law of the universe, it's best to surrender to nature.
        "Hi, it's Jimmy. I'm sorry if I woke you."
        My voice had grown shaky and had risen two octaves. I had not sounded like this since I was thirteen.
        I cleared my throat, tried again, and might have passed for fifteen.
        After keying six digits, I started to hang up. Then with reckless abandon, I punched in the seventh.
        Lorrie answered on the first ring, as if she