As the stock broker walked up to his house, as he had done a thousand times before, he noticed the next door neighbor's little boy playing outside in his dilapidated sand box. His mother had just been diagnosed with cancer and his dad had been working fifteen hour days, seven days a week just to pay the bills.
"Hey there Akeem!" the Broker said to the child, trying to break the monotony of the day with a moment of human contact. He didn't have any kids of his own yet and he liked Akeem's enthusiasm for all things life.
"Oh HI!" the little boy blurted out, with a quick glance at the Broker, then back to his dilapidated sand pit.
"Now what have you got going on there?"
"Oh, nothing much, I'm just finishing up my castle..."
The Broker looked at the "castle" as he would look at a young child's drawing of a zebra, or an elephant. The drawing looking more like a conglomerate mass of ink and lines than a discernible object. The only thing he could muster was "oh."
"Oh don't worry...," putting the finishing touches on four towers of sand, each in one corner of the dilapidated sandbox, "These are just the columns to hold the castle up! Look... see the castle?!" As he stopped his work and pointed straight up into the sky above his head, he smiled with admiration and awe. The Broker followed his pointing finger up to a blue sky, interrupted intermittently with clouds making their debut, like credits at the end of the movie, moving into and out of the frame of the sky.
"Huhh..." the Broker remarked, obviously not seeing any kind of castle. The boy was just a child, giving him the distinct advantage to know when people, especially adults, were being insincere.
"You don't see it?! Look! It's huge! It has a giant gate, and four big towers, its walls are made of big stones cut into squares, and see how white it is?" The Broker then became more confused as the child was looking up, wondering how, if there had been a castle up there, he could see its structural details when he was directly underneath it. He let the thought pass.
"Oh, you mean the clouds...yeah...oh, yeah, I could see how that one might be shaped like a castle...yeah, that's really neat."
The boy was just a boy but his childhood revealed the Broker's true sentiments yet again.
"You don't see it, huh? That's all right. It's my castle anyways. Maybe I'm the only one who can see it, but it's cool. You should build yourself a castle. You can build any kind of castle you want, because the sky is really big and there is plenty of room up there for all of our castles."
"Oh, ok...yeah, I'll think about...I'll start drawing up the plans for it tonight and start building it this weekend when I have some free time."
"Ok, but you should just start now, it's really easy."
"Thanks, I'll do that!" the Broker said as he turned aside and walked away. He entered his house thinking about Akeem, a little boy so enthusiastically bent on finishing the four columns in a dilapidated sand pit for his castle in the sky. He walked into his office and stood there, drinking in the antique classics his ritzy job was able to afford him. As he scanned the shelves, admiring his collection, one book in particular caught his eye. It was one of his old anthologies he used in college, this one was the Norton Anthology of American Literature. He had a couple of pieces of paper marking some of his favorite passages: Emerson, Poe, Dickinson, and...Thoreau. He opened up to Thoreau and scanned the page. His eyes immediately flew to the bottom of the page where he spied the word "castle" He read the part he had underlined as an undergraduate at Harvard.
“Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
He closed the book and sat down in his plush, leather chair. He closed his eyes and let himself drink in the air around him. His thoughts turned from the NASDAQ to his notebook. He hadn't written anything in it for years; maybe a couple of quotes here and there, but never anything more than a sentence or two. As he opened his eyes and looked around the room for his notebook, he said out loud to himself, "Perhaps it's about time I start writing that book I've always wanted to." At that moment, his wife happened to be walking by the door to his office and said, "What was that sweetheart?"
"Oh nothing babe...dinner almost ready?"
"Yep...I'll come get you when its ready."
As she walked away, he smiled to himself. He spotted his notebook, took it off the shelf, and picked up a pen from his desk. Still standing with the notebook in his hands, he wrote the first lines of his book.
“Dedicated to Akeem. Keep building your castle and never let it fall from the sky.”
