Your experiences this week will all make good sense within the year.
It was the sort of phrase he might have
expected to see on a fortune cookie fortune, not in a respected
newspaper—well, maybe the horoscope section, but who reads that?
Which brought to the fore another problem he hadn't considered until
just then: Who reads newspapers anymore, respected or otherwise?
Everyone now with their cellphones,
tablets, and doodads. It all made him feel older than he felt he had
a right to feel. His hair was mostly intact, still the color it had
been when he was a kid. His skin remained taut and somewhat smooth.
He still spoke in a rich baritone and used it to voice complete,
occasionally useful thoughts.
He stared at the words. They didn't
make sense to him. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this experience he
was having right now, of reading words in a newspaper that didn't
make sense, would make sense within the year. That seemed an awful
long time to wait for understanding of events that right now seemed
so hopelessly trivial.
Words on a page—be they found in a
fortune cookie or a newspaper—always made sense to him. That this
phrase eluded his grasp troubled him. Why should it be so?
But perhaps that was the wrong
question. Perhaps he was thinking too small. For example, why should
newspapers or fortune cookies even exist?
The answer is simple enough: We all
have a vested interest in what the future might bring. Past events
reported in the newspaper might give us a clue toward such events.
And he had to concede that phrases printed on paper found inside a
cookie might well do the same.
It still didn't make sense to him. Did
he have to wait a whole year?
No comments:
Post a Comment