Shadow and Substance

I've been looking to fortune cookies for guidance these days.

There will be plenty of time to work hard, enjoy yourself!

That was my husband's, from last week. Exclamation point and all. I switched it with mine when he got up to get his glasses so he could read the thing. As usual, he was none the wiser. Which is what my fortune cookie said:

You are none the wiser.

Well, maybe not exactly those words. Actually it said:

Nine times out of ten you are wrong.

What the?!? I mean, is that kind of thing even allowed in fortune cookie manufacturing? Or maybe it's some kind of Chinese joke played on those idiot Americans?

Except this time the joke is on them. I don't consider myself an American, I haven't for many a moon. Nixon and Vietnam and disco had something to do with it, but my disenchantment began even earlier, back when they canceled "The Twilight Zone." Television had such potential, then we got fat. We started out with Rod Serling and ended up with Jillian Michaels.

I was completely nuts about "The Twilight Zone," I was its Number One Fan. I might've been only ten when it came out, but I was hooked from the get-go. Watching "TZ" was one of my earliest addictions, right up there alongside thumb-sucking and nail-biting. Sometimes I sucked and watched and bit all at the same time, a talented multi-tasker in the making.

I had my favorite episodes, and my favorite lines, which I tried to incorporate whenever possible. "When, doctor, when?" I pleaded while waiting in line at the clinic for my polio booster. "My name is Talky Tina..." I intoned the first time I met my older sister's soon-to-be third (or was it fourth?) husband. "Going my way?" I inquired of the bus driver who transported us to Religious Instruction on Wednesdays. "It's a cook book!!" I shrieked after opening a menu at Bridgeman's.

If my younger sister played with my Shirley Temple paper dolls without permission, I threatened to send her into the cornfield. When I forgot to do a book report, I told Miss Solseth it fell through my bedroom wall into another dimension. I stood motionless in the living room for two hours, practicing to be a mannequin, until my dad yelled Enough is enough! and called me a buttonhead. Eventually, like everyone else in "The Twilight Zone," I started smoking.

Rod Serling died of a heart attack (his third) in 1975, on an operating table in Los Angeles. He was fifty. I happened to be in LA when he died, I took it as a sign. I was twenty-five, running away from a husband, visiting my sister-of-many-husbands, who knew a bit about flight. In honor of Rod's death we repaired to her backyard, where, talented multi-taskers that we were, we passed a pipe and a jug of Mountain Red and ate oranges off the tree and lit cigarettes.

"Next stop, the Twilight Zone," I intoned, raising a Camel heavenward in solemn tribute.

Come to think of it, the fortune cookiers could do worse than look to "The Twilight Zone" for inspiration:

You are traveling through another dimension.

You have no function, you are an anachronism.

There's time enough at last, all the time you need.

YOU ARE OBSOLETE!!

Sure beats "Nine times out of ten you are wrong." Or these gems from "The Biggest Loser":

Can you do it? You bet you can!

Just get up and do it!

Don't say you can't, say you can!

Stop talking about it, and just do it!

How appropriate to have conjured "The Twilight Zone" on this particular day. It's Friday the 13th, after all. Come to think of it, I should stop talking about it and just end this post. Before some wayward Book Awards judge gets wind of it and sends me into the cornfield.