In a small town, a resident spends years watching the place around him transform.

Two disparate neighborhoods in the town have an intense rivalry, usually played out annually on the football field. It is so contentious that one year a quarterback becomes the victim of a hit-and-run and is paralyzed. This violent, drastic high school rivalry then comes to an end when the two schools merged.

One of the town's most famous poets is arrested one day for drunk driving. His manuscripts in the back of his car are taken as evidence. When the poet later dies in custody, there is a fierce legal battle over them. As a compromise, a police officer agrees to read the poems to an editor, and after the poems are published posthumously, the police officer admits to changing the poems.

A farmer in town decides he is fed up with the local teenage boys destroying his mailboxes, so he constructs a cement mailbox. The boys return, racing down his street in the back of a truck and swinging their bat at the mailbox. The force from the impact sends the bat flying into another passenger, killing her instantly.

One night, in his own home, a man notices that his cat's collar says Fluffy when his cat is named Horace. He realizes he must have brought the wrong cat home five years prior when he and his family had moved. He calls the number on the collar and tells Fluffy's owner he found its collar.

The man and his pregnant wife move into a new home whose previous owners had a deaf child. A large "Deaf Child Area" sign is posted in their yard. One night, his wife panics and asks him to remove the sign. Later, their baby is born without a disability.

As a seven-year-old, the man performs in a play, but the play's characters all have different names than the children, which creates mass confusion. Even after the play ends, the children struggle with their own names.

A local professor is photographed and printed in the newspaper, drawing the attention of left-handed clubs across the country. The professor is invited to a left-handed person conference, but when he stands up to give his talk, he mocks their stupidity. He isn't left handed; the image was simply inverted. Years later, the professor looses his right arm in an accident and is scheduled to speak at a conference for those who have suffered the loss of a limb.

A local novelist attempts to write a book about this very town, but she struggles to cut down the length. She becomes inspired and begins cutting large sections of the book until she is left with only a haiku that is never published.