I was enjoying dinner with three other friends at The Great Wall Chinese Restaurant, located in Ruidoso New Mexico. At the end of our meal, as the tradition goes, our waiter brought us a plate with eight fortune cookies and laid it in the center of our table. The Great Wall falls on the fancier side of Chinese restaurants, so these fortune cookies were larger and didn't come wrapped in plastic like most others. I held out the plate for each of my friends to pick their first cookie before picking one for myself. The turns began that we read aloud the fortune found inside our cookie, and I went last. Yes, of course, as the fortunes were read, the words 'in bed' had to be added at the end. Tradition, right? Anyway, like I said, I went last, but when I broke open my fortune cookie, there was no fortune inside it. "Ha ha ha," teased my friend Frank, "your not lucky."
"No luck fo yoo." quipped his gal, Kim.
I leaned in to my friend Gabriel sitting to my right, and quietly said to him,"I know what this means.." At the same time, Frank had motioned our waiter to come over, and asked him what he made of the empty fortune cookie. The waiter, a handsome, young Asian man, whose parents own the restaurant we were in, thought for a moment before answering. We all hushed in anticipation. Because of his lineage we were sure he was about to depart a great and ancient Chinese metaphor of profound wisdom. "It means...that...there was...a lazy Chinese factory worker." We all laughed. Okay, well, lots of things are funnier after a few glasses of plum wine.
"No, listen, I know what it means, and it's doesn't mean that I have no luck," I said, poking fun at Frank with my sarcastic tone. I went on, "and its obvious there was a lazy fortune-cookie factory worker (say that at least ten times as fast as you can)", we all giggled, "but,...hear me out."
"I was suppose to get this empty fortune cookie."
My friends' responded with looks of confusion, "Suppose to get an empty fortune-cookie? Oh, c'mon." Frank said what everyone else was thinking. Right then, everyone, including the waiter, stopped whatever they were doing to hear my explanation,
"There's no fortune inside my fortune-cookie, because that is what's my fortune is telling me..." I paused for effect, "I make my own fortune."
In unison the small group 'ahhed' and nodded in approval. "I like that." Our waiter said smiling at me. Oh, he was cute....Where was I? Oh yeah, well then, Frank, forever a smart-ass, said,"No, I think the waiter was right - just a lazy guy at the factory." And the mood swung out of the church-like moment back to a jovial atmosphere. "No really..." I said, wanting the reverence of the moment to return. You see, Frank, Kim, and I had gone to Ruidoso to retrieve my capital assets- gaming equipment, for the vocational business I was opening up in Albuquerque. And it seemed as though all Earth's elements converged upon us to stop me. In fact, the trip was already three days over the two-days planned. Frank and Kim, a day earlier, had each caught a debilitating flu. There had been an early snowstorm no one expected that cost us a day and after all, I still hadn't secured the gaming equipment we'd come for. In addition, I'd been to Ruidoso on two separate occasions in the months prior to this trip. During the second, I was actually waiting outside the loading dock doors with a twenty six foot moving truck and a moving crew (not cheap), when the Executive Director of the table games department at the Native Gaming Casino, where my assets had been taken and wrongfully stored, questioned my business ownership and began two months with my capital assets kept in limbo beyond retrieval, while lawyers pondered litigation. Bitch!
This dinner was actually a send-off dinner for Frank and Kim because they couldn't afford any more time staying to help me. My friend, Gabriel, God Bless him, was a local resident there was hooking me up with a place to stay and a ride to get the moving truck that was an hour away in nearby Alamogordo. So much effort, time and finances had been invested without returning any results and it had culminated into the disastrous five days leading to this meal be shared. I had begun to allow my fears to manifest into thinking that getting my vocational school capital assets was simply NOT meant to be.
"Oh, so you don't think that's what it means?" I indignantly said to Frank.
"Well, I bet you can't do it twice." He replied.
"You think not?"
"I think not"
"Oh yeah?" I said, "Watch this."
There still remained three fortune cookies on the plate (Gabriel, always hungry, had eaten his second and already read the fortune - boring, even when Gabriel added 'in bed' to the end of it). I didn't hesitate. I kept my gaze of defiance locked on Frank as I reached for a cookie. Making no discrimination among the three cookies on the plate, I picked one up, and held it clinched in my hand, palm down over the plate, I pulled my sleeve up to my elbow, magician-style, so all could see 'nothing up my sleeve', I crushed the fortune cookie in my hand, then turned my hand palm up.
There was no fortune inside! Twice in a row!
Kim stared at my hand, eyes wide in disbelief. I think we all were. "Whoa!" Gabriel exclaimed as if the Earth had just shook. Like I was sprinkling an invisible saltshaker, as my hand moved back and forth, I let the pieces of cookie fall between my fingers. I half expected that little piece of paper to appear beneath the big crumbs. Nope, no fortune.
"What the f***?" said Kim, "Wow, that's cool, Teresina, I believe you.."
"yeah, I freaked myself out with that one."
I can still feel the power of the moment, when Frank had dared me, and I knew that the meaning I'd come up with was the right one that was meant for me, I felt it.
In the gaming industry, the mathematical statistics of a particular outcome is how the odds for bets and winning payoffs are decided. Based on the facts present on this night, I wonder what the odds of such an occurrence would be? Especially considering that I have never gotten a fortune cookie missing a fortune ever before; and I eat out at Chinese restaurants pretty frequently. Don't you? If so, what are the odds of finding a missing fortune back to back? And on a dare? What if I had chosen to pick another cookie out of the eight we started with? Well, the last two cookies did have fortunes in them, but no one remembers what any of the fortunes read that night. However, all who were present to see the two fortune cookies with nothing to read in them don't all believe we were meant to see this as the message that came to me. But I do. I do because I can still feel the magic of the moment I knew the second fortune cookie would be empty, and took the dare to prove that what I saw was what it was suppose to be! It still reverberates in my head:
"I make my own fortune"
.
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