Life Expectancy

Grandpa Josef's predictions.
        I survived the first of my five "terrible days." But survival came at a price.
        Being in your early twenties with a leg full of metal and an occasional limp might be romantic if you're carrying around shrapnel acquired while serving with the Marines. There is no glory in being shot while struggling with a clown for possession of a pistol.
        Even if he's a failed clown and a bank robber, he's still enough of a clown to rob your story of heroics. And render it absurd.
        People say things like So you got the gun away from him, but did he manage to hold on to the seltzer bottle?
        During the preceding eight or ten months, we brooded about and planned for the second day in the list of five, which came more than three years after the first: Monday, January 19,1998.
        As part of my preparations, I had bought a 9mm pistol. I don't much like guns, but I'm even less fond of being defenseless.
        I discouraged my family from putting their lives on the line by tying my fate to theirs. Nevertheless, Mom, Dad, and Grandma insisted they would be with me all twenty-four hours of the fateful day.
        Their primary argument seemed to be that Punchinello Beezo would not have taken me hostage in the library if he'd also had to take the three of them hostage with me. Safety in numbers.
        My response was that he would have shot the three of them dead and taken just me hostage.
        This elicited from them the weakest possible counter argument but they always felt that they won the debate with their forcibly expressed interjections: "Nonsense! Fiddlesticks! Baloney! Phoo! Pool Poppycock! Bah! Twaddle! Don't be silly! My eye! In your hat!
        That's pure applesauce!"
        You can't really argue with my family. They are like the mighty Mississippi River: They just keep rollin', and pretty soon you find yourself in the Delta, drifting along, dazed by the sunshine and the lazy movement of the water.
        Over many dinners, over uncounted pots of coffee, we debated whether we would be wise to hunker down behind four walls, lock the doors and windows, and defend the homestead against all clowns and whatever other agents of chaos came calling.
        Mom felt we should spend the day in a public space filled with people.
        Since there's nowhere in Snow Village where crowds gather around the clock, she proposed flying to Las Vegas and camping out in a casino for two circuits of the clock.
        Dad preferred to be in the middle of an enormous field with a clear view for a mile in every direction.
        Grandma warned that a meteorite, smashing down out of the sky, would be just as dangerous if we were in an open field as if we were at home with the doors locked or in Vegas.
        "Nothing like that would happen in Vegas," Mom insisted, drawing conviction from a mug of coffee half as big as her head. "Remember, the mob still runs the place. They have the situation controlled."
        "The mob!" my father said exasperatedly. "Maddy, the mob can't control meteorites."
        "I'm sure they can," my mother said. "They're very determined, ruthless, and clever."
        "Definitely," Grandma agreed. "I read in a magazine that two thousand years ago, a spaceship landed in Sicily. Aliens interbred with the Sicilians-which is why they're so tough."
        "What stupid magazine would publish such twaddle?" Dad asked.
        Grandma replied, "Newsweek."
        "Never in a million years would Newsweek publish such nonsense!"
        "Well," Grandma assured him, "they did."
        "You read it in one of your crazy tabloids."
        "Newsweek"
        Smiling, I drifted in the Delta as I listened.
        Days passed, weeks, months, and it remained clear, as it had always been, that you can't scheme to defeat destiny.
        The situation was complicated by the fact that we were pregnant.
        Yes, I'm aware that some find it arrogant for a man to say "we," considering that he shares the pleasure of conception and the delight of parenthood but none of the pain between. The previous spring, my wife, who is the linchpin of my life, had happily announced to the family, "We're pregnant." Once she had given me license to use the plural pronoun, I embraced it.
        Because we were able to deduce the date of conception, our family doctor had told us that the most likely forty-eight-hour window for delivery would be