Thursday.

I show up to Jackie's tea party with a box of Mae Wests under my arm.

"I guess with PETA having made its crackdown," I say, "it's now up to us humans to reclaim the tea party from circus chimpanzees."

"PETA wouldn't let you serve this crap to a monkey," she says, taking the snack cakes and chucking them onto the kitchen counter. The guests' children ransack them and run upstairs.

Kids are lucky. They get to explore the whole house and find out what the hosts are really about. They tear through drawers and search under beds, while we poor adults are chained to the living room with only the occasional trip to the bathroom for a quick rummage through the medicine cabinet to learn what's what.

I sit on the couch, eavesdropping on a conversation about annuities, and wishing I had a Mae West.

Friday.

I call up Henry to tell him Saturday's picnic is on.

"The weather's going to be gorgeous," I say.

"Spoiler alert!" Henry yells. "When giving away what's going to happen, have the decency to first say 'spoiler alert.' "

"I thought that was only for movie plots," I say. "Not the weather."

"From now on I want to keep everything a surprise," he says. "I don't want to live my life with one foot in the future, because that'll mean having only one foot in the present."

"And that would leave you without a foot in the nut house?" I ask.

"I'm so committed to this," he says, unimpeded, "that I'm not even going to use the future tense."

"You just did."

"Did I?" he asks. "Well, maybe I don't know what the future tense is."

"Good luck with it," I say. "I have to go shopping for the picnic, so I'll see you later."

"Please," he says before hanging up, "don't tell me that!"

Personally, I love thinking about the future. I don't think I've ever thrown out a single fortune cookie fortune. I don't go so far as to fold them into my wallet (okay, I might...) but I do usually hang on to them in some way, maybe tossing them into a sock drawer or placing them in the pages of a book I'm reading. There's something about throwing one out that feels like an act of bad faith, because all prophecies about the future should be taken seriously - even if they're prophecies that come in cookies at the end of a meal of moo goo gai pan.

I also love the idea of serendipitously re-discovering these predictions of the future, in the future - holding them in my hands and thinking about what once could have been, but never was, yet might, one day, still be. The future often feels larger, more boundless, than the past, or the present. Perhaps it needs to be because it is where we store our hopes.
At the grocery store, the first thing I throw into my cart is a box of Mae Wests. The second is a bag of fortune cookies.

"Spoiler alerts ahead," I'll tell Henry, slipping a few into his hands.