Prologue

Sometimes Tommy dreamt. He dreamt of traveling far and wide, through wind and some trees, grass fields and stars, wet sand and waves, rivers and bees. Other times, he dreamt about numbers and signs, letters and words, atoms and molecules. But his favorite dream of all was about cumulus clouds, which were puffy, tall and held moisture. They were mysterious and simple at the same time.

On his first day of kindergarten, Tom remembered spending the morning daydreaming about the Superman character on this lunchbox. He walked to his teacher and started to explain to her how Superman could fly. He said that Superman’s extra-long red cape let lots of air underneath it and lifted Superman into the sky, way up to the clouds and, when Superman touched the clouds, he floated just like they did – smooth and easy and in a direction that was best for them.

But Tom’s teacher didn’t want Tom to get the wrong idea about the world. She didn’t want Tom to think that people or Superman could fly like clouds. She leaned down and told Tom that Superman couldn’t really fly. Tom leaned forward and told her she couldn’t really imagine. 

And then Tom leaned back and kept on imagining, although, as time went on, his willingness to speak up began to dissolve. No one liked a listless dreamer, especially older people, so by the time he’d made it to highschool, he would spend most of his time with his friends, away from dreaming.

And that was almost it. That was almost the end of Tom’s story. The rest of this book was almost full of blank pages because after high school, Tom figured he would just choose a college, get a degree, maybe a graduate degree, make his way into some corporate cubical, and start to calculate derivatives on how to derive more money for company profit sake. That’s it. That’s all. A story told in three paragraphs. 

But three paragraphs just didn’t feel right. Tom was too young; too young for college; too young for the travelled path. His loving parents wanted a safe path ahead for him and his younger sister, Jessie, who was a freshman in highschool. Tom would drive Jessie to piano practice twice a week and most mornings she would turn the stereo up and roll down her window and let the cool air flow in and sing. 

No one was more proud of Jessie or Tom than their dad, John, who wanted nothing more in life than to take pictures of his kids, cook breakfast for his family, and ski every now and then. John worked as a computer programmer, and he’d graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he swam backstroke and studied math. 

Tom’s mom, Elise, was strong in character and furiously competitive, both of which sometimes caused problems in her career as a financial analyst at a large bank. One time in a quarterly review meeting, a Vice President at the bank asked Elise if she could do his laundry after the meeting was over. Elise did not respond. She didn’t want to get fired but she also didn’t want to be pushed around. So she waited and, the next day, she called the bank’s HR Department and filed an official complaint. Although the Vice President remained a Vice President, he never asked her to do anything again.

Elise and John had mapped it all out: house, family, mortgage, and save for retirement: the American Dream. The prospect of the American dream was enough for them – this made them happy and content, and their happiness grew stronger after they began to raise two healthy children, Tom and Jessie.

But, as often is the case, something suddenly happened. John suddenly lost his job. In 2008, his company cut 24,600 jobs, and John was sent home with a 6-month severance package. Immediately John started to look for a new job, but couldn’t find one right away, which caused unmasked doubt that could be seen by Tom. And with these new struggles, Tom’s college hesitations intensified and, instead of college, Tom began to think about money. He started to think about making money, about figuring out a way to beat the system that said his dad wasn’t good enough for a job. And it wasn’t because his dad didn’t want a job. It wasn’t because his dad hadn’t gone to work from seven o’clock to five o’clock every day for eighteen years, only calling in sick a few times. It wasn’t fair. 

So Tom thought about it and thought it, and the last sentence in his third paragraph ende—

Up turning into the first sentence of his story. And his story begins now.