Carey and I were both off today so we went to the China Buffet in South Plainfield for lunch.   It’s a real bargain – three buffet lines for $5.99 for lunch and the food is delicious as well.   At the end of the meal, I grabbed a fortune cookie for each of us, handed Carey’s to him, and opened mine, expecting to learn the secrets of what the summer would hold for me.  Instead, I opened an empty cookie.  There was no fortune.   I felt a cold shadow pass over me – did no fortune mean no future?  Carey kindly offered his fortune “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier” but by the rules of Chinese fortune cookies once the cookies have been dealt the die is cast.   Besides, even with the utmost optimism to multiply my fortune,  anything times zero would still be zero.

I have decided to interpret my lack of fortune in a different way from the gloomy thoughts I had at first.   No fortune means that my future, my summer,  my year, are up to me to make them what they will be.  So maybe I will take Carey’s fortune after all and use optimism to multiply the plans I make to create a future far better than any fortune cookie could foretell.

As my neighbors set up for their annual Memorial Day party, I started on my own Memorial Day tradition of rereading Emily of Deep Valley by Maud Hart Lovelace.   It’s my favorite of all the Betsy-Tacy books, set in the early 1900s in Deep Valley, Minnesota, based on the town in which the author grew up, Mankato, Minnesota.  Of all the characters in the series, Emily is the one to whom I most relate.   Emily is an orphan who has just graduated from high school but is not going off to college with the rest of her crowd in order to stay with her grandfather who has raised her since her grandmother died.   The book begins and ends with Decoration Day, with Emily decorating the graves of her parents and grandmother, the first time alone and at the end of the book with her new beau.   At first, Emily is depressed that high school has ended and her friends have left her behind.   But  she musters her wits and creates a wonderful life for herself, embarking on number of projects that leave her no time to be depressed, including reading about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War with her grandfather (a Civil War veteran), taking dancing lessons, forming a group to study Robert Browning, creating a club to help Syrian children be accepted by their American classmates, teaching their Syrian mothers English in her parlor and successfully petitioning the school board to provide citizenship preparation classes for the Syrian community.

The book has a special meaning for me this year as my own parents both died in May, my father 23 years ago and my mother two weeks ago.   I am also at a crossroads in my life deciding how I want to create my future.   And so, like Emily, I am mustering my wits and starting to plan my future,  drawing upon her courage to inspire me along the way.