Creative Writing Challenge #7: Tree of Life--Stumbling Into Paradise

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I was a millionaire once, did I ever tell you that?

Eighteen, nineteen years ago. I had spent the last decade working as a financial professional hawking products to get people into the stock market by any means necessary, and I woke up one morning and knew I was supposed to be doing something else. So I quit, and went to work for myself, doing...nothing. For eight months. We were so broke that when someone put a sack of flour on our doorstep one night, my wife and I just held each other and cried.

But at the end of that eight months, I somehow inserted myself into the sale of an internet company to a smart-card company, and I had a job. The job was supposed to pay $70k a year. It might even have done that, if they'd made payroll more often than once in three.

They didn't.

Still, for a guy making nothing whatever, once in three was still a step forward. And the company was forced to pay us in stock for the missing cash. I ended up, after a couple years, with 125,000 shares.

Then they put me in charge of the marketing of the company. We went public in a reverse merger--basically took over a company that had a stock listing--and the stock was worth about a quarter. I started pimping us. We hit a dollar. Two. Four.

I got us, one glorious day, to $8.04. On paper, for a bright afternoon, I was a millionaire.

But the company was all hat and no cattle. The software was fragile, undeliverable as advertised, and incompatible with the most popular systems. We were like one of those fancy salads that looks great on the menu but once you get it in front of you you know you can eat five platefuls and sit down and starve to death. With no more than two dozen investors who stood to lose everything, we basically put a gun to their heads and said they needed to cough up more dough or we were going to go belly up.

They did. We used the crutch to keep going for another little while, when I saw the writing on the wall, and refused to continue talking up a dead company, like a lighthouse that promises safety from the sea, and delivers only barren wasteland instead. I didn't quit so much as went to the boss and told him he couldn't afford me any more, and he should fire me. He gave me a severance package that was fairly generous, and fed my family for a year as the stock cratered and ended up at around that quarter we started at.

I had big dreams, then. I thought I was going to be a billionaire, have a big office and fancy cars, jet all over the planet doing deals. My dreams sucked crap through a tube and I'm grateful every single minute that I didn't get what I wanted, then or (mostly) ever.

The best things in my life are my family, my religion, and my job.

I like brunettes. I married a blonde. I wanted to have a couple kids. We have eight.

My religion requires long hours of study and prayer, and once asked me to spend two years in a communist country preaching the gospel on the off chance I wouldn't get arrested. Oh, and I got to pay my own way. It was one of the best times of my life and utterly changed the person I was.

I teach junior high and write stories for a living, only everyone knows you can't make a living teaching school and writing books, so it took me another fifteen years after the millionaire thing before I wandered into doing what I do now. I have no formal training. I just keep doing stuff, and people pay me.

All along my life's path, I've had chances to do what I thought was right, or what I felt was right. In the big moments, every single time, if I did what I felt was right something happened that was far different from what I thought I wanted, but turned out in every case to be better than what I imagined for myself.

I would never be here, writing this from a little apartment on the fourth floor of a 200-year-old building in the 12th district of Budapest on a platform that's only existed for a year to an audience of people that I don't know under any circumstances I could have designed. The joy and wonder that is my life came almost entirely from events I didn't forsee and in some cases rebelled against. I haven't so much as compromised as surrendered. But there's always been a voice whispering in my ear, and when I've been quiet and humble, I've heard it. It's never steered me wrong.

Here's to bumbling through the next fifty years, toward something I can't even imagine.