At a nearby table, Mr. Baxter, Claire's father, sat with his glistening and be-gemmed business cronies ignoring his progeny, while Mrs. Scott-Baxter, his fourth (and trophy) wife, blonde and young and bored, glowered at the Baxter spawn like a mother mink in a mink farm, just waiting for a jet to strafe the facility, affording her an excuse to feign terror and eat her young.

The whole Baxter clan had en masse been imported from L. A. that weekend by the highly superstitious Mr. Baxter, a New Age convert (thanks to wife number three), to avoid a most certain doom in the city Shakey Angelinos like him were luridly envisioning the strangely large houses of the valley and canyons being inhaled into chinks in the earth with rich glottal slurps and no mercy, all the while being pelleted by rains of toads. A true Californian, he joked: "Hey, at least it's visual."

Claire, however, sat looking profoundly unamused by her family's spirited, italicized conversations. She was idly tethering her paper plate loaded with a low-calorie/high fiber lunch of pineapple bean sprouts and skinless chicken to the outdoor tabletop while forceful winds, unseasonably fierce, swept down from Mount San Jacinto. I remember the morbid snippets of chitchat that were being prattled around the table the hordes of sleek and glamorous young Baxters:

"It was Hister, not Hitler, Nostradamus predicted," one brother, Allan, a private school Biff-and-Muffy type, yelled across a table, "and he predicted the JFK assassination, too."

"I don't remember the JFK assassination."

---

Have you ever wanted to set your parents' house on fire just to get them out of their rut? Just so they had some change in their lives? At least Claire's parents get divorced every now and then. Keeps things lively. Home is like one of those aging European cities like Bonn or Antwerp or Vienna or Zurich, where there are no young people and it feels like an expensive waiting room.

"Andy, I'm the last person to be saying this, but, hey - your parents are only getting old. That's what happens to old people. They go cuckoo; They get boring, they lose their edge."

"These are my parents, Dag. I know them better than that." But Dag is all too right, and accuracy makes me feel embarrassingly petty. I parry his observation. I turn on him: "Fine comment coming from someone whose entire sense of life begins and ends in the year his own parents got married, as if that was the last year in which things could ever be safe. From someone who dresses like a General Motors showroom salesman from the year 1955. And Dag, have you ever noticed that your bungalow looks more like it belongs to a pair of Eisenhower era Allentown, Pennsylvania newlyweds than it does to a fin de siecle existentialist poseur?"

"Are you through yet?"

"No. You have Danish modern furniture; you use a black rotary-dial phone; you revere the Encyclopedia Britannica. You're just as afraid of the future as my parents."

Silence.

"Maybe you're right, Andy, and maybe you're upset about going home for Christmas - "

"Stop being nurturing. It's embarrassing."