I HAD A SCARY thought the other day.

It went something like this: In a couple of years, the Truly Unpleasant Mrs. Johnston and I will be empty nesters. These are people who have raised their children, watched them move out of the family home and now look at each other with one question in mind:

"Who are you?"

Three of the Johnston children have graduated from high school and, in between playing at college, they have all gone into one of the two professions available in Seattle: Typing on computers or making lattes to be sold at inflated prices to the people typing on computers.

The three Johnston boys selected making lattes because it pays more than poking around at a computer and writing code. Plus it has job security. Even when the computer pokers get laid off, they're still java junkies who need their daily fixes.

The youngest Johnston child, a girl named Molly, will finish high school in two years and probably do something out of Johnston character, like go to a university and become a doctor. She will need to buy lattes from one of her brothers.

Whatever the Johnston children decide to do with their lives, however, one thing is fairly certain: They won't be doing it in the family home. The Johnstons like to move out and try to make it on their own as soon as possible.

(I must digress a bit here. The Johnston boys may move out, but they keep in touch with the family refrigerator and food closet. Mrs. Johnston likes to have them over for dinner and then load them down with food in case they are starving to death at their apartments. So we may become "empty nesters" but I don't think we will be totally alone as long as we have food.)

Nevertheless, there will come a time that Mrs. Johnston and I will have to get to know each other again. I don't mean "know" each other in the biblical sense as in Abraham "knew" Ruth, but in the sense that we will have to find out what has been going on for the past 20-some years.

That might mean having dinner somewhere besides in the car when we're on the way to a soccer game, or at the joint that has hamburgers wrapped in yellow wax paper.

What might happen is Mrs. Johnston and I will get into the car by ourselves and head off for dinner at a restaurant where they have cloth napkins and knives and forks made out of metal, not plastic.

I know some readers are wondering if I will be worried about Mrs. Johnston having a sharp metal knife in her hands directly across the table from me. Sure, that always makes me worry. But something else about that future dinner worries me even more.

It's the possibility of Mrs. Johnston finally getting a chance to talk to me just one-on-one and thinking to herself: "Thank goodness I haven't had to listen to this guy for the last 20 years."

Then she might start looking at that knife.

Steve Johnston is a retired Seattle Times reporter. Paul Schmid is a Times news artist.