This essay by Karla Theilen appeared on StrongTowns.org on November 6, 2022.
The other night my husband and I got Chinese takeout, and at the bottom of the white paper bag were three fortune cookies, which makes things complicated when there are just two of you, and one of you is very competitive. This isn’t because the actual cookies — the flavor of which ranges from library paste to vanilla cardboard — are so delicious, but because of what’s hidden inside.
We (I) decided on a blind grab with closed eyes, agreeing to get the superfluous third fortune out of the way first, and decided that it would be a message intended for both of us.
I hodl, therefore I am.
I thought this was a typo, or something lost in translation — the way once I got a fortune that said, “A hot both can cure anything,” or the time the lucky numbers section featured just the number 16, followed by a series of commas.
“I hodl, therefore I am”?
Eager to uncover the mystery, I did a quick internet search and found out that HODL is an actual acronym that means, “Hold on for Dear Life,” and is associated with the world of buying and selling crypto currency. The message was a dud, after all.
Chris’s fortune said, “To be upset over what you don’t have is to waste what you do have,” and on the back, ironically, were the words, “How about another fortune?” and the address for a website called secondfortune.com.
The one I grabbed for myself said, “Why do savings accounts earn such little interest? It makes no cents.” It got a chuckle, but didn’t really follow the fortune cookie rules, as far as I was concerned. Not an aphorism, or a juicy bit of advice, just a silly pun didn’t make cents tucked inside a fortune cookie. Luckily, however, it did come in handy, after all.
Though I did receive a fortune in a cookie some 20 years ago that said, “Soon you will be sitting on top of the world”… the day after I received a job offer to work on a fire lookout… I don’t put much stock in or plan my life around fortunes, especially when there’s the chance you might get one (as I did once) that says, “Here’s my advice: Don’t take advice from a cookie.”
As much as I like to be the one who is surprised, I also like to be the surpriser. The morning after Halloween, I had one Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, the single piece of candy left in my house after the Minions, skunks, bumble bees, witches, Spider Men, and the entire cast of Stranger Things made their rounds the other night. Instead of inhaling it, I decided to leave it for my mailman, Milo, in the mailbox.
I checked later that evening and though there was a new stack of credit card offers and political ads, the peanut butter cup was still there. Maybe Milo was sick of candy; maybe everyone left candy for the mailman the day after Halloween and I was painfully unoriginal. Or maybe, I thought, he grew up in the ’80s and worried the candy contained a razor blade, or the crushed aspirin we were warned about back in simpler times when kids thought aspirin was deadly.
But after the second day, I clapped with delight to see the candy was gone. I imagined Milo sitting in the mail truck with his right arm extended, looking left, then right, then grabbing it with a shrug.
We humans like opening up things and finding other things. Nesting dolls, geodes, Tootsie pops. I’ve even seen some dog toys that have another dog toy inside after the dog destroys the first one, like a stuffed heart inside of a squeaky gorilla, or a plush cactus doll with a sad face inside the larger smiling cactus. Even dogs, it seems, want something to look forward to.
I lived in an apartment building once where there was a peculiar little square door with a wooden knob about the size of an 8×10 photo hanging at about chest height in the public entryway, concealing a niche in the wall where a telephone may have sat at one time. No matter what, every day it was part of my routine to open the little door hoping to find something inside. After several months of this, I opened the door one day to find an antique Sunkist soda bottle, dirty and clouded with age. I almost shrieked (or maybe I did and don’t remember) at the shock and delight of it. But of course, I took it out and was disappointed to see there was no message inside the bottle.
I am, I realize, that person that the secondfortune.com website is targeted for.
I thought about putting things behind that little door, too, but realized I was probably the only one in the building who ever opened it. This was confirmed when I asked a neighbor who’d lived there for over a decade if he was ever curious about what the little door in the entryway was all about. “What little door?” he asked.
I always look for notes in library books, too. Publicly shared books are a great source for treasures: grocery lists, vocabulary lists, receipts, love notes, and ticket stubs. I found a college paper someone had written on One Hundred Years of Solitude tucked inside a hardback copy of the book at the public library years ago. The paper, along with a very easy-to-follow, hand-drawn timeline, made the book so much easier, and more enjoyable, to read. There was also a boarding pass from Seattle to Bogota, Columbia, in the pages, which made me wonder if the person had taken their research very seriously.
Which reminds me of a story of friend who had always wanted her old boyfriend to read a particular book she loved—which I can’t remember the title of—though he never did oblige. They eventually broke up, though probably for a different reason. Years later, she recommended the same book to her husband, who bought a copy at a used bookstore, and inside the paperback was a boarding pass in the ex-boyfriend’s name. This is a true story. I have no way of proving it, you just have to trust me.
Going through a box of my father’s things a couple of days after his memorial service last month, I found a book about the Yellowstone Fires in 1988, and remembered how my father and I had been there that very summer, driving through those smoky roads in a long line of cars headed for safety, flames coming right up to the sides of the roads.
As I flipped through the pages of dated photographs of walls of flame, firefighters with handlebar mustaches, and dazed bison, elk, and deer walking down smoky roads, a single sheet of paper tucked in the pages caught my eye; handwriting I recognized as my own from back in the late teen days when I decided to change my handwriting to all caps.
The letter was written on notebook paper which had the fuzzy edges trimmed off. I can’t imagine myself doing something that thoughtful at age 18, and honestly believe that was an after-market adaptation by my fastidious father, but I can’t prove it.
I had gone to work at Yellowstone National Park in a restaurant right after high school graduation in 1991, and much of the letter was comprised of banal teenage drivel; complaints about early hours serving breakfast, lazy co-workers, and a description of a horseback ride I went on with a group of tourists from Japan which I have only the vaguest of recollections of. Further into the letter, I thought back to that summer of 1988 when he and I had been there during the fires. I also mentioned I had purchased the book for him for Father’s Day, and that I had purchased the book with my employee discount, which seems appallingly tacky, but I knew then, as I know now, that he would have loved knowing his daughter was savvy and got a good deal.
Plus, I also mentioned that I loved him and missed him, which might have had something to do with his saving the letter, too.
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