The window open, the neighbors strangely silent, I propped myself up on an elbow and a pillow to listen, turned toward Gregg next to me and said, "It's so quiet out tonight I can hear the ocean."  He shifted his weight to a single elbow, turned his head up toward the window and listened.

      "It's not really the ocean, It's the freeway; it just sounds like the ocean, but occasionally you can hear a motorcycle or monster truck.  We haven't been able to hear the ocean since they tore down Burt Reynolds' house and built those condos.  We used to have a free pathway to the ocean through the park, but not anymore, not with those condos there.  Now you can only hear the freeway."

      "Oh really," I said, "That's too bad, and all this time I was sure it was still the ocean; it sounds like the ocean.  I hate those ugly monstrosities the built.  Why'd they have to build them?"

      "I don't know," he said and listened.  But have you noticed that since his house is gone there aren't any more cockroaches?"

      Burt Reynolds, not the Burt Reynolds, but our neighbor, lived in a little house across the alley with about twenty cats, an unkept yard of tall, dead weeds and grass, rusty tricycles and discarded garden tools, where millions of cockroaches lived.  The roaches loved his yard.  "Remember," Gregg said, "When we used to walk to the 7-11 and stomp roaches all the way.?"

      "Yeah, crunch, crunch.....crunch, crunch.  It was gross.  And Erwin said he saw hundreds of little roaches once, dancing in the moonlight around the drainage grating, and I thought he was crazy but loved to imagine him watching all the little roaches dancing....until I saw them too."

      Burt Reynolds had a garage sale every weekend before he and his neighbor sold their houses and their adjoining lots.  His wife's grandfather had given them that house and she had grown up there.  They had more stuff than anybody I'd ever met before and his friends would come over and add to it.  They would sit out in their lawnchairs and use the profit to buy beer.  After a while they didn't have to put up signs or advertise anymore.  We just went, every weekend to check out the new stuff.  After he moved his family and all the things he really cared about out, he let us in the house to pick through the piles of stuff - and buy whatever we wanted.  All we had to do was make an offer, he said, but not the kittens; his wife wanted to keep them.

      Inside, the first thing I noticed were all the little round pieces, globs of colored glass, the kind they used in stained glass ornaments, stuck to the ceiling.  He said, "Oh, I did it for the kids, it looks neat at night with the lights down low, like stars and the sky."  Then, he fished through his pocket for his Swiss army knife, reached up and chipped one off the ceiling and said, "Here, want one?"  And before I could answer, he had handed it to me.  I still have that piece of blue glass with the plaster stuck to the flat side.  It's all that's left.  Two weeks later Burt Reynolds' house was gone.