Sometimes you just… you get to a certain age, seventy-six now, pushing seventy-seven, and you look back and see all these little threads, these patterns you didn’t notice when you were busy pulling them. You know that feeling, like putting on reading glasses and suddenly the whole tapestry makes a kind of terrible sense? And I’ve been thinking a lot about these plastic bricks, the tiny ones, the ones that click together with such a satisfying precision. My grand-nephew, bless his heart, sent me a whole box of them for Christmas, thinking it was a joke probably, a little nod to the fact that I spent my whole working life in corporate law, building… well, building things on paper, mostly. Complex structures of legal precedent, you understand, not so different from a castle really, just far less tangible. And I sit here in my study, the one overlooking the back forty where old man Henderson’s cows used to graze before he sold out to that consortium from… well, never mind where they’re from, it’s all the same to them. And I build these ridiculous castles. Hours pass. The light changes from that weak winter grey to something almost purple before it’s gone entirely. It’s an odd thing, this compulsion. To stack these tiny, brightly colored pieces, following the diagrams with a diligence that my partners back in the city would have commended, though they would have thought it utterly MAD to apply it to something so… frivolous. But there's a kind of peace in it. You know that deep focus, that hyper-attentiveness where the rest of the world just fades? Where the ache in your hip, the distant wail of the ambulance on the highway — it all just… recedes. You become entirely absorbed in the mechanics of interlocking pieces, the structural integrity, the careful placement of each individual brick. It’s a very specific kind of satisfaction, a sense of control over something, however small and ultimately meaningless it might be. My wife, before she passed, she used to say I was always building walls around myself. She was a keen observer, my Eleanor. Always saw things clearer than me. And now, all these years later, here I am, still building walls. Only now they’re made of plastic, not legal jargon. And sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and the only sound is the ticking of the old grandfather clock in the hall, I find myself staring at these miniature fortifications. These painstakingly assembled keeps and turrets, rising up from my desk blotter. And I wonder, you know, if maybe the whole point wasn't the building itself, or even the castle. Maybe it was just… the forgetting. The brief, sweet oblivion of putting one tiny piece in front of another. And then the morning comes, and the light hits the plastic just so, and you see all the dust motes dancing in the sunbeam, and the castle just sits there, perfectly still, perfectly complete, and perfectly, utterly… useless. And yet, I keep building them. Another one started just last week. A Bavarian monstrosity, this one. Far too many spires. But then, you know, sometimes you just… you keep doing what you do. What else is there?