I don’t like to be pessimistic but I have a little issue I’m having trouble resolving. Maybe you, with the wisdom and understanding I know you possess, can help me out.
After a lovely Chinese dinner from our favourite restaurant last evening, we cracked open our fortune cookies to see what messages were contained within each one. My wife got, “The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” My daughter’s message read, “If the cake is bad, what good is the frosting?” And the little slip of paper that fell from my son’s shattered cookie said, “I learn by going where I have to go.”
“Wow,” I thought. “What great little sayings.” I could hardly wait to read my fortune.
I cracked open the brittle brown cookie to find …
Nothing.
I felt a chill run up my spine. What does it mean to not get a fortune in your fortune cookie? It was like opening a Christmas present from Santa Claus to find nothing in the nicely wrapped box. Not even a lump of coal. Or phoning the doctor’s office to get the results of all those tests only to be told there are no results and never would be.
Now you, being an optimist and a happy soul, would content yourself with thinking logically that whatever process is used to insert fortunes in fortune cookies simply failed to deposit one in mine. But my mind is ninety-six percent imagination and four percent logic. It is geared to zoom from zero to one hundred in a millisecond, the higher number representing disaster.
It was as if the Chinese gods decided not to waste a fortune on me. I wasn’t even worth getting a message about a mouse and cheese or a cake and frosting.
It’s 12:30 a.m. My family are all in their beds. Sleeping.
They are so fortune-ate.
©2022 Jim Hagarty
