最后的演講:平房里的電梯 (2/4)

For two days, with the help of my sister, Tammy, and my friend Jack Sheriff, I painted on the walls of my bedroom. My father sat in the living room, reading the newspaper, patiently waiting for the unveiling. My mother hovered in the hallway, completely nervous. She kept sneaking up on us, trying to get a peek, but we remained barricaded in the room. Like they say in the movies, this was "a closed set." What did we paint? Well, I wanted to have a quadratic formula on the wall. In a quadratic equation, the highest power of an unknown quantity is a square. Always the nerd, I thought that was worth celebrating. Right by the door, I painted: [-b±√(b^2-4ac)]/2a Jack and I painted a large silver elevator door. To the left of the door, we drew "Up" and "Down" buttons, and above the elevator, we painted a panel with floor numbers one through six. The number "three" was illuminated. We lived in a ranch house – it was just one level – so I was doing a bit of fantasizing to imagine six floors. But looking back, why didn't I paint 80 or 90 floors? If I was such a big-shot dreamer, why did my elevator stop at three? I don't know. Maybe it was a symbol of the balance in my life between aspiration and pragmatism.