Not but a few days ago my wife, Debbie, and I crossed our little lake to visit my favorite mother in law. After various shopping activities, we landed at one of my favorite eateries. The food was superb, plentiful and more than we could manage. While our waiter prepared the remainder of our bountiful meal for transport to our refrigerator at home, we three satisfied diners broke open the cookies that our waiter traded with us for the food we hadn’t eaten. If you clicked the link “one of my favorite eateries” above, you would understand that the cookies had to arrive. The tradition is inescapable, even if the style of cooking in this eatery predates the cookie tradition by several centuries. Those cookies contained such interesting fortunes that this blog became as inevitable as the cookies themselves.
I think Dot, my mother in law, opened her cookie first. She is a strong proponent of dessert, to the degree that she often repeats the proverb: Eat dessert first; that way you will always have room for it. 
Not that she lives out this proverb in my observation. I couldn’t say what she does when I’m not around, but then it isn’t any of my business. Back to the cookies. She passed the fortune that fell out of her folded sugar cookie to me and I read: “Be brave enough to live creatively.” That Dot should get advice about how to live, struck me as laughable. She has already used up almost 90% of a century doing a bang up job of living, and seemingly as if that advice had been delivered back before she had gotten through the first 15%.
Debbie got her sugar fold out of the obligatory plastic wrap, broke the cookie open and passed me the little slip of white paper on which was printed: “Nothing is a waste of time if you learn something from it.” Debbie’s activities as political guardian angel of our little town by the lake
has born much fruit in the learning category, even if many of the locals would call what she does a waste of time.
Now that I had read the cookie fortunes liberated by my wife and my mother in law, I got down to breaking the seal on the cookie in front of me. The little slip of paper protruding from the cookie came out willingly. I read it and passed the cookie carcass to Debbie. She really likes those little folded and baked bits of carbohydrate a lot more than I. My fortune was the kicker. “A person of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.” OK! OK! Got it!!
I will not give up cultivating nettles every day as I run out of gas when the sun sets, but as long as I have the energy to think thoughts (hard for a tenor) and move about, I will keep following the wisdom these cookies handed out. I have been doing that creative thing that Dot was advised to do even if it has been for two thirds the time Dot has been at it, and I never thought I was wasting time,,,,, even while cultivating nettles. I don’t call myself a talker, and, until I started putting words into blog form, I didn’t think of myself as a person of words. Given my inability to spell most words worth more than two cents, I used to think I had recourse only to deeds. Spell check has helped a lot, but Debbie is the key to me staying on solid ground sorting out the alphabet into words to put on the internet.
Those cookies were nice little reminders of the wisdom one can find in The Book that is still awaiting reading in the night stand beside many beds in the hotels and motels of these United States. They are provided by generous people and are full of much paraphrased wisdom. Even cookies can carry little sagacious snips of wisdom pruned from Proverbs. That would be the twentieth book in The Book you can easily find on your travels in the USA or in any book store. It is a best seller, by the way, and full of wisdom.
I am no fan of Fortune Cookies, but that post repast convergence of cookie recommendations surprised me, and reminded me that common sense is just remembered tidbits of wisdom read, lived and repeated in paraphrase from The Book.
Wait a minute.
I am a tenor!!!
Those fortunes had flip sides. You know, the back side. There used to be a nice white space nothing to look at back there. It would seem the “nothing is a waste” fortune got interpreted by the manufacturer as “waste nothing” and, printed Chinese words with translations in that space.
On the back of Dot’s “creativity” counseling we find the verb: To Eat. Remember the “dessert first” philosophy Dot supports? If that isn’t creative eating, I’ll eat my hat.
The advice that all “education” is valuable that Debbie got had the flipside translation of the word: “Egg”. Debbie’s “guardian angel” work at the Town of Plattsburgh is an egg that hatched into supporting candidates to office who inspire Debbie with hope that change for the better can take place.
The flip side of the “don’t grow weeds” fortune that came out of my cookie translates: “Eggplant”.
I have the sneaky feeling that this slip of paper is trying to call me a name. You know. Like, TENOR! But that may just be because of my tenor tendency toward paranoia.
So how do you think I should take “Eggplant”? If you have any ideas, I’d love to know them. Send me a note. Please. I’ll add it to this blog.
PS. Debbie, my wife and Editor in Chief, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to remind me that she will be planting some eggplant in her garden. She just loves those purple flowers.