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evening's end, as we clicked off the TV and room lights and made our way bedward. "Remember how we'd go at it some nights after you came in from checking outside?"
    Replied I (if I remember correctly), "I do indeed," and gave her backside a friendly pat.
    Indeed I do.

Toga Party

    I F "DOC SAM" BAILEY —Dick Felton's longtime tennis buddy from over in Oyster Cove—were telling this toga party story, the old ex-professor would most likely have kicked it of with one of those lefty-liberal rants that he used to lay on his Heron Bay friends and neighbors at the drop of any hat. We can hear Sam now, going "Know what I think, guys? I think that if
you
think that the twentieth century was a goddamn horror show—two catastrophic world wars plus Korea and Vietnam plus assorted multimillion-victim genocides, purges, and pandemics plus the Cold War's three-decade threat of nuclear apocalypse plus whatever other goodies I'm forgetting to mention—then you ain't seen nothing yet, pals, 'cause the twenty-first is gonna be worse: no 'infidel' city safe from jihadist nuking, 'resource wars' for oil and water as China and India get ever more prosperous and supplies run out, the ruin of the planet by overpopulation, the collapse of America's economy when the dollar-bubble bursts, and right here in Heron Bay Estates the sea level's rising from global warming even as I speak, while the peninsula sinks under our feet and the hurricane season gets worse every year. So really, I mean: What the fuck? Just as well for us Golden Agers that we're on our last legs anyhow, worrying how our kids and grandkids will manage when the shit really hits the fan, but also relieved that we won't be around to see it happen. Am I right?"
    Yes, well, Sam: If you say so, as you so often did. And Dick and Susan Felton would agree further (what they could imagine their friend adding at this point) that for the fragile present, despite all the foregoing, we Heron Bay Estaters and others like us from sea to ever-less-shining sea are extraordinarily fortune-favored folks (although the situation could change radically for the worse before the close of this parenthesis): respectable careers behind us; most of us in stable marriages and reasonably good health for our age (a few widows and widowers, Doc Sam included at the time we tell of; a few disabled, more or less, and/or ailing from cancer, Parkinson's, MS, stroke, late-onset diabetes, early-stage Alzheimer's, what have you); our children mostly middle-aged and married, with children of their own, pursuing their own careers all over the Republic; ourselves comfortably pensioned, enjoying what pleasures we can while we're still able—golf and tennis and travel, bridge games and gardening and other hobbies, visits to and from those kids and grandkids, entertaining friends and neighbors and being by them entertained with drinks and hors d'oeuvres and sometimes dinner at one another's houses or some restaurant up in nearby Stratford—and hosting or attending the occasional party.
    There now: We've arrived at our subject, and since Sam Bailey's
not
the one in charge of this story, we can start it where it started for the Feltons: the late-summer Saturday when Dick stepped out before breakfast as usual in his PJs, robe, and slippers to fetch the morning newspaper from the end of their driveway and found rubber-banded to their mailbox flag (as would sundry other residents of Rockfish Reach to theirs, so he could see by looking up and down their bend of Shoreside Drive) an elaborate computer-graphic invitation to attend Tom and Patsy Hardison's
TOGA PARTY!!!
two weeks hence, on "Saturnsday, XXIV Septembris," to inaugurate their just-built house at 12 Loblolly Court, one of several "keyholes" making of the Drive.
    "Toga party?" Dick asked his wife over breakfast. The house computer geek among her other talents, between coffee sips and spoonfuls of blueberry-topped granola Susan was admiring the artwork on the Hardisons'