We buy take-out Chinese food for dinner last Thursday. It's amazing how the restaurants know just
the right amount of fortune cookies to put into the bag, so my son and I are
thrilled to find two cookies with our order.
He opens his fortune right after he finishes several plates
full of food. I always let others choose
their cookies first because I like to think they are choosing their fortunes
while I leave mine to fate, the luck of the draw. It is perhaps a very bad way to go through
life, but since it's merely a fortune cookie, packed into the confection by an
American processing plant no doubt, I don't put a lot of stock into the
cookie's precognitive powers. My son's
fortune is vague and ethereal, as most of them are: A
master can act without doing anything, teach without a word.
I ignore my fortune cookie, letting it sit quietly on the counter,
tucked into the corner by the basket of car keys, wrapped up in its cellophane
cover. Every time I pass it by over the
next three days, I think nonchalantly and somewhat flippantly, "My fate
awaits me. I wonder what it will
be." Ha ha ha!
Finally, Sunday rolls around, the day I have to bring my
Chinese-food-eating son back to college.
I realize that I should probably open the fortune cookie and share with
him what great words of wisdom our dinner has held secret. Sure, it's just a meaningless ritual; sure,
it's just words on a tiny piece of paper, printed out randomly by a computer
program fed through to an industrial printer.
I don't really care what it says, after all, because it's the
camaraderie of the experience.
Right? RIGHT?!
I believe this until I break open the fortune cookie. For all my denial of true and heartfelt
anticipation, for all my pretense that I do not believe in the truth held
within a folded tasteless circle of crunchy brown confection, I am all at once
horrified to discover my fortune cookie is empty. Empty. EMPTY.
I am essentially fortuneless.
 |
| (This is the actual cookie.) |
Suddenly it hits me: I
have no future!
Damn you, pork fried rice.
To hell with you, chicken wings.
May the Force not be with you, beef teriyaki.
My mind starts rolling:
Should I call a psychic? Have my
Tarot cards read? Go to a palmist? Play the lottery? Up my life insurance coverage?
Kudos to the clever minion working the assembly line who
decided to skip a cookie's fortune. I
can just imagine you rubbing your hands together in glee wondering what kind of
psychotic idiot is going to go postal over missing non-Ancient Chinese wisdom
with their take-out egg rolls. You
clever bastard. You got me good, my
friend! I salute you.
And may I add, Great and Powerful Fortune God, that you,
sir, are a master who can act without
doing anything, teach without a word.
In other words, Consumer Confucius.
Rei, my sensei, I bow to
you.
