My wife and I eat out fairly
often: a bowl of soup or a bagel sandwich when we go to the gym. About once a month we will go out for a nice
restaurant meal – usually right after our retirement checks come in. Occasionally we will go down to Augusta
We always start out with the
soup: my wife will have the chicken broth with a dumpling in it and I will have
the hot-and-spicy with a dumpling added.
After the soup we allow ourselves one plate: some fish and mostly
vegetables. And of course, we finish
off the meal with a fortune cookie and tea.
I could easily do a post
about fat people at the Great Wall; but this is about fortune cookies.
About six months ago we went
to the Great Wall and had the usual meal.
The young Chinese girl dressed in oriental attire brought our bill and
the usual two fortune cookies. We
always open the cookies; read our fortunes; glance at the pronunciation of the
Chinese word on the back; share the fortunes and then immediately forget
them. But this time my fortune was:
YOU HAVE NO FORTUNE – I shit you not…YOU HAVE NO FORTUNE.
I am sure that some fat
person would have taken that fortune slip, stormed out of the restaurant
without paying, gone directly to a ambulance-chasing lawyer and claimed to have
suffered untold mental anguish as a result of ‘having no fortune.”
However, that is the best
fortune cookie I have ever had – and the only one I will ever remember. I like to think that someone in a fortune
cookie bakery in some Chinese sweat shop – put one across on the bosses and
slipped in the ‘no fortune’ fortune: a little act of defiance.
My only regret is that I
didn’t keep the fortune slip.
the Ol’Buzzard
