Fortune cookies

While mentally playing with the Fortune Cookie idea, I remembered a poem I heard and loved and memorized when I was in elementary school. It mostly came back to me and although I have no idea to whom credit is due (I will try to Google it or see if I can check some other way before I finally post). I shall share it anyway but take no credit for its creation.
Three Wishes
I keep three wishes ready
Lest I should chance to meet
Any day, a fairy
Coming down the street.

I'd hate to have to stammar
And have to think them out
For it's very hard to think things up
When a fairy is about.

I'd hate to lose my wishes
For fairies fly away
And perhaps I'd never have a chance
On any other day.

So, I keep three wishes ready
Lest I should chance to meet
Any day, a fairy
Coming down the street.

I haven't thought of the poem in years, but I know back then I did keep 3 wishes ready---what were they? Who knows? Possibly one was for world peace and another for good health, happiness and riches for all I loved. But I do know the third. The third wish was always for more wishes, or as I believe I expressed it then: a wishing wand. As a child I thought that was really clever; now it sounds selfish, foolish and greedy. Needless to say, I never needed this odd little bit of preparedness. (Always the Girl Scout--then and now.) But I am convinced that had I met that fairy and gotten 3 wishes, my life would not have turned out any better than it has as a result of putting my hand in the hand of God and being let by Him.

Fortune cookies---they are a dime a dozen (almost literally). They are terribly generic and ambiguous. The best part of them now, as it seems to me, are the lottery number suggestions. But I don't use those often either nor have I ever won money on cookie numbers. But sometimes there is a little magic in thinking at the end of a very good day or a very lovely evening, that we ought to stop by the magic market on the way home and buy a lottery ticket. But we usually are tired and don't remember to stop. But I enjoy the little dab of sweet taste and the ubiquitous philosophical platitude at the end of a Chinese meal: the appropriate punctuation. I cannot imagine the meal without the cookie or the cookie without the "fortune."

Is it, maybe, that we keep, in fortune cookies and horoscopes and lottery tickets and wishes on shooting stars, just a tiny little bit of that magic we believed in as children?? If so, I think that's a good enough reason to keep enjoying them.

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Oh, fun!! Google gave it to me straight away and I had only missed about 4 words in one phrase (line 11), 'tho I had kept the meaning exactly. Google credits the poem to Annette Wynne. I fixed that line, so it reads as Ms. Wynne intended.