Good Fortune

No eatery promises words of wisdom at the end of a meal like the local Chinese restaurant. For all my gluttony there is always room for a slice of orange and fortune cookie with its strip of a pithy aphorism inside. I never give up hope that Lao Tzu will turn up. Instead I usually get some Chinese version of, Have a nice day, which I wouldn't put up with on an empty stomach. 

But after being narcotized by egg foo young and moo-shoo I can imagine God scribbling away in their kitchen. Where else would he be except in some undiscovered recipe. Certainly not watching over the soy sauce or steaming the hell out of the rice. Though he might be sympathizing with the oversized fish in the underside tank or on the tip of my muted tongue between the hot and pungent.

But last night's words could have come from Rilke (or my eye doctor). You will see beauty where others see nothing unusual.

As the new tea steeps, I am drawn into the wallpaper where a foot bridge spans across a stream in a hill town along the Yangtze, soon, I imagine, to be dammed and the village flooded. The river is a dragon whipping its tail through the mountains swallowing the landscape with its unseeing eyes. Beauty seen and beauty erased but with its remembered residue. 

On the way home I am suddenly fluent in the language of roots, how they slither under the fig tree like an amphibian, half seen and half immersed doing their fancy dancing. What does it mean? Nothing and everything depending on how much we give ourselves over to it. 

Half an hour later I am hungry but only for beauty, still under the spell of my fortune cookie. There is nothing unusual except my gratitude for this lucky life, with moments still pulsing from every one of my ninety years, from column A and column B, the sweet, the sour and spicy.