March 21, 1947
Dear Caroline,
Welcome to the world. I can hardly believe I am sitting here writing you a letter on the day of your birth, but Lydia insisted. She wants me to keep a record of these years so that one day, I may show them to you. I personally think it’s silly, but oh well. She’s gone through so much these past nine months, it’s the least I can do for her.
Well, you’re crying now. I guess I should stop writing to future you and spent time with the real you, so I will stop now.
Your father,
Ken Barrow
March 29, 1947
Dear Caroline,
I suppose I should tell you about myself. Again, by the time you are old enough to read, you will know all this already, but Lydia insisted I write something, so here I am again. I am proud to say I am the Vice President of the Falls Bank; I was the one to turn the bank from a nearly-bankrupt loan company during the Depression to the financial giant it is today. My genius was to realize that, if interest rates are high enough, loans can be offered to almost everyone, and the profit from the people who pay them back will outweigh the ones who don’t. This may not mean anything to you, but eventually you’ll have a husband who will understand it.
Lydia’s calling me; regretfully, I must go.
Your father,
Ken Barrow
April 10, 1947
Dear Caroline,
My brother Will came to visit us today. He’s your uncle-- but I’m sure you’ll know who he is when you read this. To his credit, he’s excellent with children, although he isn’t married. He played with you all evening. You laughed and laughed.
I may love Will, but I don’t understand him. He refuses to keep a steady job. He bounces around, from one occupation to another, from one poor apartment to another, never making himself a reliable living. He’s asked me for money before, but I’m not a charity. If he wants a loan, he’s more than welcome to come to Falls Bank and apply for one.
And another thing about Will-- he believes in the strangest things. He’s horribly superstitious. He believes in fate, and curses, and he believes there’s no such thing as luck. Most annoying of all, he reads tarot cards constantly. Every time I see him, he tells me, “Look at what my tarot cards said would happen today,” and I tell him, “Why don’t you try to decide what will happen to you, instead of letting the cards do it?” But I know it’s pointless, he’s been like this since he was a child.
On this particular day, he was insistent on doing a tarot reading for me. I had a dinner with some powerful executives, and so I could not stay, but he would not let me leave without reading just a single card. He flipped it over, and it was the Earth or something, except upside down.
“Ooh, that’s not good.” he told me. “The World Reversed means failed plans or unfulfillment. Something’s gonna go badly in the future.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “What will go badly is if you make me late to my dinner.”
As usual, he was off his rocker. The dinner went perfectly, and we closed out the deal we were trying to make-- an agreement with the other major bank in the city to raise interest rates across the board. I felt a little bad for how I treated Will, but honestly, he deserved it. The man doesn’t know what it’s like to actually work for something. That’s why he’s where he is and I’m where I am.
Your father,
Ken Barrow
April 16, 1947
Dear Caroline,
You gave us quite a fright today! I admit, it was my fault, I was supposed to be watching you while Lydia was making dinner, but I became engrossed in the paper. You had so many wonderful toys, and yet you kept staring that the globe we had on the mantle, so I figured I’d take it down and let you play with it. I look away for one minute and you’ve somehow managed to knock it off its stand, sending it rolling upside down into the fire.
Well, fortunately I was quick enough and stopped it before it got there. But I felt bad nonetheless. If things had worked out just a little differently, that globe could have been burnt to cinders. You’re really keeping us on our toes!
Your father,
Ken Barrow
May 12, 1947
Dear Caroline,
Oh, Lydia’s mad at me. I haven’t written you a letter in almost a month! I’ll have to come up with something to tell you.
Today I went to visit Will at his apartment. I protested, telling him I’d rather meet anywhere else in the city than at those tenements, but he insisted. So we met at his rundown, dirty building, in his nasty, cramped apartment, with barely enough room to move around.
He started in on his true purpose for inviting me almost immediately. “Ken, I need your help. I’ve found a great place downtown, and it seems like somewhere I could finally settle down. But I need some money for the down payment, and it’s more than I can scrape together at the moment. Would you please help me out? If I got the money, I could move in next week.”
--I must digress for a moment, Caroline, to tell you something very important about the world. There are people who take, and take, and take, until everyone around them has nothing left. These people never learn to provide for themselves, to produce anything on their own. Do not let you, or anyone around you, be like this. Give a man a fish, and he will ask you for another one tomorrow. Make a man learn to fish for himself, and he’ll never bother you again.
So with that in mind, it’s probably not hard to fathom what my response to Will was.
“No.”
Will’s face fell. “Come on, Ken. I promise I’ll pay it back. Don’t you trust me?”
“It’s not about trust. You could have gone to college and gotten a steady job like me, instead of running off to who knows where doing who knows what. It’s not my responsibility to cover for your mistakes.”
“It wasn’t a mistake. I wasn’t cut out for college-- you saw me in school. I could never have made it through. It’s you acting all high and mighty because you have more money than me and you think you’re better than me. You’re not better than me. You and your stupid high interest loans are the reason that so many people can’t ever get a better life than this.”
Caroline, I’m afraid I shouted something here that’s unfit for the eyes of a young lady such as yourself. I won’t burden you by recounting any more of this fight. After it was over, we sat in silence for almost ten minutes.
To break the silence, he tried to read my tarot cards again. I didn’t have the heart to argue with him anymore, so I let him. When he got to the last one, he flipped the same card he had the last time he visited. “The World Reversed, again.”
“Oh, really,” I replied. “What a funny coincidence.”
But he wasn’t smiling or laughing. “Wrong. There’s no such thing as a coincidence. It’s a sign, Ken.”
“A sign that I need to spend less time listening to crazy talk, maybe.”
“The World is the most powerful card in the deck. When it flips upright, it means everything’s going to go right. When it’s reversed, it means something you’re doing isn’t going to turn out well.”
I got all the way out to my car before realizing I had absentmindedly been clutching the World card which he had handed to me as he was explaining it. I didn’t feel like returning it, and to be honest, he could do without flipping that card and scaring everyone for a change.
An interesting thing happened when I got home. I showed you the tarot card, just as a little game. I know you can’t even see clearly, but to make fun of Will, I decided holding it right-side up and upside down and seeing if you could tell the difference. Well, you could. Whenever I held it right-side up, you cried, and when I turned it upside-down, you started laughing. It was the darndest thing. Anyway, until next time, Caroline.
Your father,
Ken Barrow
May 25, 1947
Dear Caroline,
As I write, I am fighting back tears. I’m not going to be able to write you a long letter, but I need you to know how I feel right now. This hurts even more because in my last letter to you, I talked about visiting Will, but that may have been the last time I ever saw him.
There was a fire in his building last night. It was almost totally destroyed. I went to work, but I could not focus on anything. I sat anxiously awaiting the news about him.
Well, I just found out. He’s not dead, but the doctors have told me it doesn’t look good for him. It seems that the fire escape in his building wasn’t functional. I don’t know what came over me, but I paid all of his bills. If he gets out alive, he won’t owe anything.
And if he dies, I just wasted money. So why doesn’t it feel like a waste?
Your father,
Ken Barrow
May 26, 1947
Dear Caroline,
It’s two AM, and I have yet to sleep a wink. Every time I close my eyes, all I can hear is Will’s voice echoing in my head. “Something you’re doing isn’t going to turn out right.”
Why did this happen to him?
--Well, the obvious reason is that he was still living in that awful apartment.
Why was he still living there?
--Well, because he didn’t get the money to move out in time.
Why didn’t I lend him the money?
Why
didn’t
I lend him the money? He may be a deadbeat, but he is trustworthy, and he wouldn’t go back on his promise. That money isn’t going to do me any good sitting in my bank account, and it might have saved his life.
Well, he might still be alive, but I don’t want to think about that right now. I don’t want to think about anything. I just want to sleep.
Your father,
Ken Barrow
May 28, 1947
Dear Caroline,
I just got done talking to the mechanic. Looks like my car is not going to be a total loss. That’s good, but I don’t really care about it right now.
My memory of today is not good. I have not slept at all in three days. I’ve missed all of my meetings and appointments at work. Instead I worked on setting up a program. A low-interest loan program, with almost instant payout and no jumping through hoops required. I called the newspapers. Before long people from all over were flooding through our doors, full of hope, with a light in their eyes that they had long since thought was extinguished. For over an hour, I sat in our main branch and watched, but with every person who ran happily through our doors with cash in hand, I wished that person could have been Will.
Sure, Will made some mistakes in his life. But is that really the price you should have to pay for a mistake? That can’t possibly be right.
Somehow, when the president of the bank came into the office today, I hadn’t thought about what would happen on his arrival at all. Perhaps I was too tired to think properly.
Caroline, once again I will have to omit some details, on account of sparing your precious eyes from reading the horrible words that were said at this exchange. Suffice to say that he did not take to my new program very well, and I did not treat him with respect befitting a Vice President. The official reason for my termination was “misuse of company resources,” but that wasn’t the real reason. The last thing the president said to me was, “You’ve lost it.”
But on the contrary, I’d like to believe that I found something.
I feel at ease now, as though I’d lost a great burden I didn’t know I had.
Your father,
Ken Barrow
May 31, 1947
Dear Caroline,
I received a phone call from the hospital today. I felt sick to my stomach as I answered. I thought I knew for sure what I was about to hear.
But somehow, whenever you think you know something in this world, it flips upside down on you. They had told me the odds of Will surviving were one in one hundred fifty-six, and yet somehow, he had managed to pull through.
Lydia drove me to the hospital right away. I didn’t waste any time. I needed to talk to him about this.
“Will,” I said, as I burst into his room. “I need to talk to you.”
His smiled weakly when he saw me. “You look terrible.”
“Will, I haven’t slept for almost a week. I feel awful. Every single night I asked myself why I didn’t just lend you the money. This is my fault. I’m sorry. I-”
He cut me off. “It’s not your fault,” he said, shaking his head. “It was in the cards.” He gestured down to my hand.
With a shock, I realized that the tarot card was in my hand. I hadn’t thought about grabbing it, but somehow I had. “Will, I need your help. Everything’s all wrong in my life now. I’ve tried everything. What can I do to make it right again?”
Will reached out and took the card. He held it up to me. “Your world is reversed now, Ken. The World Reversed brings failure and destruction. While you’re governed by the World Reversed, you can’t make it right again.” He handed me back the card.
“Wh... what do I do, then?”
“You need to turn the World upright again. Go on a journey. Leave behind everything that you are, and go seek out something new. The World was once a blessing to you, and it’s become a curse. You need to make it a blessing again.” At that moment, his nurse came in and forced me to leave. I gave him a wave and left, still clutching that wretched card.
Go on a journey? That sounds like utter nonsense. How could that solve the problems that I have?
But then again, what other options do I really have? I renounced my position at the bank, I have used my wealth to help others, and my brother has miraculously survived, and yet I feel no better. So, Caroline, I’ve made my decision.
I’ve called a friend of mine and bought up a boat. It’s furnished with all the latest gadgets and technologies. I’ll let the currents of the ocean take me where they will, and I will cast the World down to the bottom of the sea. I don’t know if that will make things right, but at this point, I choose to have faith. I owe it to Will.
I set out tomorrow. The instant I get back, I will write you another letter and tell you all about my trip. It is time for me to see, once and for all, what Fate has in store for me!
Your loving father,
Ken Barrow
