2021 theme: RUPTURE

BY THE NUMBERS Eric E. Wallace From the street to the garage, the driveway was 100 yards, 2 feet, 1.44 inches long. Vincent had carefully measured and remeasured it himself, doublechecking the estimator’s igures before agreeing to have the old dirt driveway paved.

It wasn’t that Vincent was fussy to the point of being anal — though he was — or that he didn’t trust people — he didn’t — but more that, he lived for numerical accuracy.

Apart from the surety of numbers, life was uncertain, capricious, unfair.

A prime example was the coronavirus pandemic, which chose to commence only a week after the paving was inished. Suddenly the driveway was barely needed.

Vincent and Olivia, childless, both recently retired — he from an accountancy irm, she from teaching high school biology — went into lockdown on their ive Idaho acres and dove into their individual pursuits.

Olivia tended to an expanding number of garden plots, planted and nurtured an orchard, raised chickens in a PETA-approved coop, spent many hours Zoom-communing with other retired teachers and pampered her cats, Petal, Pistol and Sepal.

Vincent manipulated his holdings in the stock market. He improved his chess game and competed on the internet with players from around the world, memorizing every move.

He took daily walks (4) around the perimeter of the property, interspersed with laps (6) up and down the driveway. He crisscrossed the grounds along luscious curves based on Fibonacci spirals, his routes adjusted only when Olivia grumbled about intruding on her plantings.

He learned the number of posts and rails on every section of fence (460), the average number of paving stones on each pathway (17.5), the height of each evergreen (range: 10 to 33 feet), the average number of twittering quail in a covey as measured against the marauding of Olivia’s cats (15/9).

At supper one night, Olivia announced that his daily numerical accounts had become boring. She stretched out the irst syllable of bo-ring in a lippuckering way, holding it, by his mental clock, for a bravura 1.5 seconds.

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