Ours is the number three town for artisanal pickling.  Also, the number four town for handlebar mustaches. And that’s in the nation, coast to coast, Brooklyn included. 

Nightlife? Wolcott ranks consistently in the top five.

Winter sports? Wolcott gets more annual snowfall than Barrow, Alaska, and the number of days of sunshine exceeds even that of the Sunshine State. 

Personal and moral hygiene? Wolcott has the lowest rate of debilitating syphilis ever recorded.

Wolcott is outcomes-oriented. Wolcott is data-driven. Our rate of recycling is a full three standard deviations from the mean. Every year, Wolcott’s average SAT scores rank among the top ten of high schools nationwide—and that’s just our freshmen, let alone the juniors and seniors. Venture capital? More start-ups per capita than Silicon Valley. Spiritual advantages? More saints have been beatified from Wolcott than any metropolitan area on the planet save Rome.

Spelling? Third in the state.

Flowers? Consistently top-ranked dahlias. 

Ponies? The best and fastest and most child-friendly.

I’m not saying a ribbon guarantees success or good character or anything more than a cup of black coffee, provided you have a couple of extra dollars, but sometimes proficiency for proficiency’s sake is quite an accomplishment. 

The probability of your success in your chosen field rises exponentially the moment you cross the town line. I’ve personally crunched the numbers.

My kids are the proof behind the stats. My son? President of his class. First one to stand up for the little guy. Unofficial teen peace envoy to the Republic of North Korea. Hard to measure kindness, but my son won a trophy for it, and it still stands on our mantle. 

My daughter built the smartest AI-driven robot in the country: it has now matriculated at Harvard. She also invented a twenty-seventh letter for the alphabet, which is getting more traction than the letter Z. 

Collectively, we’re the number four family in all Wolcott for production of organic legumes. The third most musical. Our compost heap is the town’s envy. 

All this abundance sometimes makes me pity our rivals, with their lack of artisanal picklers and catastrophic insurance and divorce rates. 

Of course, data aren’t destiny. When we first moved to Wolcott, the mortality rate among teen boys was half the national average. Statistically speaking, Wolcott had zero registered firearms and two of the top ten suburban hospitals. Wolcott was the place least likely for a parent to have to march through a bullet-ridden classroom to identify his son’s corpse. The least likely place for a daughter to make her first slip in the national rankings because she couldn’t shed survivor’s guilt. 

Wolcott’s best known now for mass shooting. We rank first in the world for stiff upper lips. We’re the number one town for promptly burying our dead. We have a bumper crop of sorrow. The numbers alone can't do it justice.