Inventory 

There are, at last count, five women on our street who live alone. Two of these women have names that start with B. One of these Bs keeps cats, of whom she has six. All of these cats are males and have names that start with B. The non-cat-owning B walks with the only J of the five women. They walk into town and back and never, as far as I can tell, stop talking. J carries a walking stick, which has a silver handle in the shape of a dog. I once saw her use the stick to chase away from her azaleas the cat the other B calls Bernard. All of the women at one time or another were married. Three are divorced and two are widows. Of the three who are divorced two are divorced twice over. Of the two who are widowed, one has three children and two grandchildren, the other two children and three grandchildren. One of these grandchildren is a little girl about four years old who has the same name as the cat-owning B’s Persian: Blake. Blake is not owned by Blake’s grandmother. There is frequently a car parked in front of L’s house and it is never the same car. It is always a sedan of the luxury class. L is one of the divorcées. F, who lives on the other side of the two gray-haired men who share the same build and drive foreign cars, likes to work in her yard and owns a large assortment of gasoline-powered lawn implements as well as a pair of protective ear goggles—they are goggles not muffs. I have never seen F without her goggles. Our street is not far from a railroad track, although it is not the kind of street that location implies: while we are not exactly on the right side of the tracks, we are not on the wrong side either. We are also on the flight path of the airport, even though the airport is fifteen miles away. It is one of the busiest airports in the world. On some days the combination of noise produced by trains, airplanes and F’s lawn implements is deafening. I’ve calculated that each of these days erases an hour from a normally healthy person’s life, and if this person lives on this street twenty years she will lose 15.07 days she would have lived had she resided on another street, all else remaining the same. All else rarely remains the same. My wife believes in one god, which is probably, as Pascal suggests, the prudent course.