“Never Kiss an Elephant on the Lips”, a fortune from a cookie.

Almost everyone has one, a saying from a fortune cookie that sticks in their head. I remember as a kid what a treat it was to get a fortune cookie as my parents never ate Chinese Food. My mom hates rices still to this day and thinks all Chinese is made with rice :) I used to wonder how they got the little paper into the cookie? And why didn’t it burn up in the oven? And I always loved the taste of them, some had a tint of lemon (at least I think that is what it was), others had a tint of stale. But I ate those crunchy little
things like they were treasure, trying savory every bite.

Just a few weeks ago I got one that told me ” You will be going out on the water soon.” Well I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a fishing trip already planned for early the next morning with Eric. That was the first time one ever really specifically laid out a fortune and it came true. They are kind of like Nostradamus’s predictions, if you put enough out there at some point one will come true. Also like the blind squirrel saying I used when Skippy showed up with a girl at a party years ago. “Even a nut finds a blind squirrel sometimes.” Okay that didn’t fit there but thought I would throw that in for humor and a jab at Skippy, but I digress.

A few years back Sharon and I were in San Francisco exploring China Town. As we walked down a tourist trap of a street, full of overly-gaudy brightly lit signs and banners decorated as if we just stepped onto the movie set of

“Big Trouble in Little China” we stumbled onto the San Francisco Fortune Cookie Factory. I remember thinking of what a place like this would be like back when I was kid pondering those fortune cookie questions. It was not the Willy-Wonka-like-factory that I had imagined, with magical machines and little chinese women scurrying around creating those mystical confections. Instead it was a small cramped space no bigger than the tourist shop next door. There were 2 old chinese women cranking out the cookies. The cookies were flat and then they simply inserted the fortunes (which were not being hand-written by Confucius) into a machine which folds them. It was a slightly depressing sight actually. We did walk away with a treasure bag of chocolate fortune cookies. I did not even know they came in chocolate! Come to find out, what we thought was maybe one of many factories there, ended up being the only one around and people search for it all the time and come up empty handed because it is so hidden. It is half famous and half legend. Which has made it more special to have found after all.

If you have read any of my books you may have noted that each book has a fortune cookie saying in it that I found at some point in a cookie during that journey. In Volume 1 it was “You can’t have everything, where would you put it all?” That was so poignant at the time because we had just moved into the motor home and we trying to figure out how to store all the stuff we owned in such a small space and ended up shedding a lot of unnecessary junk. It was nice to unburden ourselves and uproot.

In Volume 2 the saying I included was “Your greatest fortune is the friends and family you have.” This was a perfect fit for the volume as it was titled,

Friends, Family and Lost Soles.

Many times I have said that wealth sometimes cannot be measured in money, but in friends and family. Partially because we were so poor that we had to feel good somehow, but that I have been blessed with great family and friends who are my family. They are something money just cannot buy.

I just started looking through our collection of fortune cookies sayings, that we collect in a bowl on the mantle, to see which one I wanted to use for Volume 3. I came across the funniest one I think we have found “Never kiss an elephant on the lips.” While it is funny and volume 3 is a little more light-hearted than 2 it still did not feel like the one to use. Eventually I came across “In the end there are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” PERFECT. It was so appropriate for this book. The entire book explores themes revolving around faith and hope, and ends with perfect love. The love for a child. Unending, boundless, and pure.

I am sure many of you have some great fortune cookie sayings you remember and I would love to hear them and any good stories behind them.