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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 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