Michael fumbled around in the pockets of his hound's tooth wool trousers in search of his front door key. The frigid wind blew south at his back, sneaking underneath his scarf, and the grip of his wingtips on the frozen sidewalk was precarious.

    So was everything about his life, he thought. Tuition was going up, thanks to a re-structuring at the university, but the student loans were already starving him; he still had three more semesters left, at minimum, before he qualified for graduation. But with a liberal arts degree, even from an Ivy League school, Michael was already looking down the barrel of the new American Dream: hitting the streets fresh out of college with a long road of indebtedness stretching into the foreseeable future.

    He leaned against the stoop and lit a cigarette. His father was a smoker too, and he recalled adolescent nights sitting on the front porch, his father gesturing in the twilight air with the glowing Kent fag, lecturing him on the virtues of finishing high school. Michael did not finish high-school. Disinterest and defeatist teachers planted even less inspiration in him than his fathers' monotonous manifestos about steady income, IRAs, and how he had worked so hard to put himself through college. Alas, his father's liberal arts degree had NOT been enough to put Michael through school. Having earned a high school equivalency degree after a three-year hiatus from lectures, textbooks, and the drudgery of non-popularity, he enrolled in a general studies program at an Ivy League school, with high ambitions, a love for literature and languages, and a Fannie-May student loan.

    As a teen, Michael endured many smoky front porch lectures under his dad's heavy arm. If anything from those nights stuck with Michael, it was his father's steady insistence that one day he would be thankful he had spent many tedious hours practicing the piano. The music lessons, his father guaranteed, would eventually pay off, as long as Michael stuck with them. That promise swirled into Michael's head as he took the last dirty puff from the cashed Marlboro and rose to his feet at the base of the stoop. He was glad his father wasn't with him on that porch. With a loud and inpatient exhale, he snuffed the butt on the sidewalk, pulled the front door key from his pocket and entered the small apartment building on East Lovett Street.

    Heat from the radiator drew tiny rivulets of sweat to Michael's forehead as he unlocked the mailbox in the hallway. He withdrew the stack of Fannie May envelopes and junk mail and walked toward the stairs. He started to flip through the stack, then gave up. It had been a long week, and Michael didn't feel like letting the bills get in the way of  unwinding. He felt as though relaxation was an impossibility these days, as his completion of school was becoming more and more of an uncertainty. If he could only bear to break this news to his dad, who was still slaving in a high school classroom as a Latin teacher, he would feel better.

    What Michael didn't know, though, was that a single postcard in the uninspected stack of mail he carried would soon manifest his father's decade-old promise. Later, Michael would wonder if the sincerity in his father's words hadn't actually helped bring about that manifestation, though his dad never would have accepted that sort of credit. Michael also didn't know that in just a few months his father would be dead, having died a very happy man.