The King and the Castle

Once upon a time there was a young Prince who had no family, having lost both his parents. He was rather wealthy and lived in a big house with a couple of servants, but knew something was still missing in his life. Before his mother died, she said,

“Leon, you have a special destiny. If you have not found your purpose for being here on Earth by the time you are twenty-five, you would do well to go on a quest to find your true kingdom and castle.”

Prince Leon was a bit beyond his twenty-fifth year, yet he’d been putting off venturing outside his childhood home. He was really a homebody, never having gone to overnight camp, and preferring to spend his days in his room reading fairy tales. For one thing, he was really bad at camping. The tent poles never seemed to line up right, making a fire was something he preferred to leave to the servants, the moldy leaves and grass caused him to sneeze, and hiking more than a quarter mile hurt his feet. So Leon decided to talk to the Almighty.

“God, would You please help me? Send me a sign that it is time to find my fortune, preferably with some stops at reputable inns.

As often happens when humans invoke the Divine, they soon forget the requests they have so fervently made. That night, after a particularly challenging game of chess with his knight Brigit (Brigit won),

Leon went to bed and dreamed of nothing more than the winning chess moves he could have made with just a bit more time.

On awakening, just as dawn was breaking, with the birds singing mightily, he heard a pounding loud as a jack hammer on the outside of the wooden shutters. Since he slept on the second floor, he wondered what kind of giant pileated woodpecker could have mistaken the window coverings for a tree.