{"id":3287,"date":"2014-05-01T09:00:58","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T13:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rockwellblake.com\/blog\/?p=3287"},"modified":"2014-11-25T08:30:44","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T12:30:44","slug":"wisdom-by-fortune-cookie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/2014\/05\/01\/wisdom-by-fortune-cookie\/","title":{"rendered":"Wisdom by Fortune Cookie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not but a few days ago my wife, Debbie, and I crossed our little lake<\/a> to visit my favorite mother in law.\u00a0 After various shopping activities, we landed at one of my favorite eateries<\/a>.\u00a0 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\u2019t eaten.\u00a0 If you clicked the link \u201cone of my favorite eateries\u201d above, you would understand that the cookies had to arrive.\u00a0 The tradition is inescapable, even if the style of cooking in this eatery predates the cookie tradition by several centuries.\u00a0 Those cookies contained such interesting fortunes that this blog became as inevitable as the cookies themselves.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think Dot, my mother in law, opened her cookie first.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\"IMGP0014<\/a> Not that she lives out this proverb in my observation.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t say what she does when I\u2019m not around, but then it isn\u2019t any of my business.\u00a0 Back to the cookies. She passed the fortune that fell out of her folded sugar cookie to me and I read: \u201cBe brave enough to live creatively.\u201d That Dot should get advice about how to live, struck me as laughable.\u00a0 She has already used up almost 90% of a century doing a bang up job of \u00a0living, and seemingly as if that advice had been delivered back before she had gotten through the first 15%.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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: \u201cNothing is a waste of time if you learn something from it.\u201d\u00a0 Debbie\u2019s activities as political guardian angel of our little town<\/a> by the lake\"IMGP0678<\/a> has born much fruit in the learning category, even if many of the locals would call what she does a waste of time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 The little slip of paper<\/a> protruding from the cookie came out willingly.\u00a0 I read it and passed the cookie carcass to Debbie. She really likes those little folded and baked bits of carbohydrate<\/a> a lot more than I.\u00a0 My fortune was the kicker. \u201cA person of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.\u201d\u00a0 OK! OK! Got it!!<\/strong><\/p>\n

I will not give up cultivating nettles<\/a> 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I don\u2019t call myself a talker, and, until I started putting words into blog form, I didn\u2019t think of myself as a person of words.\u00a0 Given my inability to spell most words worth more than two cents, I used to think I had recourse only to deeds.\u00a0 \u00a0Spell 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 They are provided by generous people<\/a> and are full of much paraphrased wisdom.\u00a0 Even cookies can carry little sagacious snips of wisdom pruned from Proverbs.\u00a0 That would be the twentieth book in The Book you can easily find on your travels in the USA or in any book store.\u00a0 It is a best seller, by the way, and full of wisdom.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wait a minute.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am a tenor!!!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those fortunes had flip sides.\u00a0 You know, the back side.\u00a0 There used to be a nice white space nothing to look at back there.\u00a0 It would seem the \u201cnothing is a waste\u201d fortune got interpreted by the manufacturer as \u201cwaste nothing\u201d and, printed Chinese words with translations in that space.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the back of Dot\u2019s \u201ccreativity\u201d counseling we find the verb: To Eat.\u00a0 Remember the \u201cdessert first\u201d philosophy Dot supports?\u00a0 If that isn\u2019t creative eating, I\u2019ll eat my hat.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The advice that all \u201ceducation\u201d is valuable that Debbie got had the flipside translation of the word: \u201cEgg\u201d.\u00a0 Debbie\u2019s \u201cguardian angel\u201d work at the Town of Plattsburgh is an egg that hatched into supporting candidates to office who inspire<\/a> Debbie with hope that change for the better can take place.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The flip side of the \u201cdon\u2019t grow weeds\u201d fortune that came out of my cookie translates: \u201cEggplant\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have the sneaky feeling that this slip of paper is trying to call me a name.\u00a0 You know. Like, TENOR!\u00a0 But that may just be because of my tenor tendency toward paranoia.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So how do you think I should take \u201cEggplant\u201d? If you have any ideas, I\u2019d love to know them.\u00a0 Send me a note. Please. I\u2019ll add it to this blog.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PS. Debbie, my wife and Editor in Chief, couldn\u2019t pass up the opportunity to remind me that she will be planting some eggplant in her garden.\u00a0 She just loves those purple flowers<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not but a few days ago my wife, Debbie, and I crossed our little lake to visit my favorite mother in law.\u00a0 After various shopping activities, we landed at one of my favorite eateries.\u00a0 The food was superb, plentiful and more than we could manage. While our waiter prepared the remainder of our bountiful meal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3288,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/IMGP0613.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2kj1l-R1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3287"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3295,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3287\/revisions\/3295"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rockwellblake.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}