Too much truth • I stopped by this Saturday to visit my mother-in-law at Rosedale House. The place makes “assisted living” seem more like a luxury than a euphemism—not because it’s glitzy or plush, but because it’s sweet and safe and all your cares are gone. Reminds me strangely of a college dorm, albeit without the angst and stale beer—everybody’s in this liminal state, not fully engaged in the outside world, sheltered and communal with an emphasis on fun. Anyway, I found all 18 residents happily seated around tables learning the history of fortune cookies. They fumbled with the cellophane, extracted the beige Styrofoam cookies and slowly, breath held, read their fortunes.
“Oh,” one woman said, disappointed. “This won’t work.” She was about to be lucky in love, with the hint that the affair would be quite torrid. She gave a cheerful shrug; those days were long gone. My mother-in-law was scheduled to “make a name” for herself; one of the gentlemen was about to receive great wealth.
I left kind of sad; why can’t they make fortunes a bit more real, and a bit more universal? Surely there’s something you could safely predict of just about anybody, at any stage of life? “You will be scared.” “You will enjoy a rich dessert.” “You will have an odd dream.” “Someone will annoy you.”
Once I started researching fortune cookies at St. Louis restaurants for this magazine, hoping to have some fun discerning whose were cleverest and most accurate. Turned out they were all mass-produced someplace else and ordered by mail. Then I found out that, just like Chinese food, Chinese fortunes have been dumbed down and sweetened for Americans. We couldn’t handle the darker predictions.
Screw the fortune cookies, I’ve decided. St. Louis needs its own superstitious ritual, something indigenous and homegrown. So Sunday I went looking for Creole French superstitions—and found plenty. I stopped dead at a passage about a slave named “Old Jeannette”—hmmm—who, according to the Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, “was regarded with terror by many on account of her supposed ability to destroy people by her incantations.”
Fame and fortune are looking better all the time.
—Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
