“Then there’s the commercial streets, big ones with parking lots flanking them and all the businesses behind the parking lots, or on them. Like Tustin Avenue, right down there.” He points north.

“Or Chapman.” “Or Bristol.” “Or Garbage Grove Boulevard.” “Or Beach.” “Or First.” “Or MacArthur.” “Or Westminster.” “Or Katella.” “Or Harbor.” “Or Brookhurst.”

“Yeah yeah yeah!” Tashi interrupts them. “Point proven! There are many commercial streets in OC. But they all are one.”

“I wonder,” Sandy says dreamily, “if you blindfolded someone and spun them around to disorient them, then took off the blindfold somewhere on one of the commercial streets, how long it would take them to identify it?”

“Forever,” Tash opines. “They’re indistinguishable. I think they made a one-mile unit and then just reproduced it five hundred times.”

“It would be a challenge,” Sandy muses. “A sort of game.”

“Not tonight,” Abe says.

“No?”

“No.”

“The third kind of street,” Tashi forges on, “is the residential street, class A. The suburban streets of the housing tracts. Please don’t start naming examples, there are ten zillion.”

“I like the cute curly ones in Mission Viejo,” Sandy says.

“Or the old cul-de-sac exclusive models,” Jim adds.

“And the fourth type?” says Abe.

“Residential street, class B. The urban ap streets, like down there in Santa Ana.”

“A lot of that’s original platting,” Jim says. “Now it’s as close to slums as we’ve got.”

“As close to slums?” Abe repeats. “Man, they’re there.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“There’s a fifth kind of street,” Sandy announces.

“You think so?” Tash asks, interested.

“Yeah. I guess you could call it the street-freeway. It’s a street, but there’s nothing facing it at all—it’s backed by housing-development walls, mostly, and there’s no shops, no pedestrians—”

“Well, none of them have pedestrians.”

“True, but I mean even less than usual. They’re just avenues for tracking fast where there aren’t freeways.”

“Negative numbers of pedestrians?”

“Yeah, we use those a lot,” Abe says. “Like Fairhaven, or Olive, or Edinger.”

“Exactly,” Sandy says.

“Okay,” Tash agrees. “We’ll make it five. There are five streets in OC.”

“Do you think it’s because of zoning laws?” Jim asks. “I mean, why is that?”

“More use habits than zoning, I’d bet,” Tash says. “Stores like to be together, housing developments are built in group lots, that kind of thing.”

“Each street has a history,” Jim says, staring out the window with his mouth hanging open. “My God!”

“Better get writing, Jim.…”