My Wish

I have a wish. Wishes are such ephemeral things, here today, gone tomorrow. They have no substance in their larval stage. The length, depth and breadth of them don’t really matter. A wish is a deeply personal thing, so you can keep your judgments to yourself, thank you. My wish is no better than yours, and yours no better than mine, even though they might be separated by a bajillion dollars.

Wishes move outside the dimension of time, or at least the metric of time like the day, or the hour. You can make one anytime, and nobody needs to know, unless you choose to tell. Telling is what heads them off at the pass—it’s the only surefire way I know to drop’em dead in their tracks.

We all have years of practice not telling, of course.

“So what did you wish for,” they all ask, as the smoke from the candles floats lazily towards the ceiling.

“I ain’t saying,” we reply. We are firm in the conviction that any birthday wish, revealed so soon after it has been released, will fall to earth with the velocity of an armored chestnut, nettles and brown icky stuff seeking the nearest body part to strike.

“What was your wish, c’mon, tell,” our sibling says, after the satisfying crack of the wishbone fades into the rich smell of turkey and cranberries and stuffing that clings like lint to the walls of the dining room.

Sometimes we just smile, and don’t respond. Are we smiling because the likelihood of our wish coming true is enhanced by the heft of the turkey bone in our hand, or simply because we have bested our sibling? For once. Or for the fortieth time.

Again, the answer resides in that little secret place where we formulate wishes.

I wonder, though. If we have just made a wish, and then allowed ourselves to indulge in rascally thoughts, is the wish fatally tainted aborning? And what happens to wishes that don’t get answered. Are they recycled? Do they morph into prayers?

And how different really is a prayer from a wish? I suppose a prayer should be a combination of supplication and maybe a little craving of indulgence. Is a prayer a conditional wish?

“Yeah, Spirit who guides us all, I love and honor you. If you love me too, please convince Nancy La Grange to give me her phone number.”

As opposed to a straight, formally structured wish.

“I wish I had Nancy La Grange’s phone number.” There is a slight difference in form, that’s true. But maybe a wish is shorthand for a prayer. Maybe we just assume that a wish knows it is being addressed to some entity greater than ourselves.

But when you cut them both to the core, the little dishonesty of each gleams like a pearl.

We don’t want Nancy La Grange’s phone number to have and to hold in perpetuity. We don’t even want Nancy La Grange’s phone number. We have wished and prayed for Nancy, although we could never admit that. The phone is merely the most socially convenient way of beginning a process of gaining access to Nancy that will ultimately result in, well, gaining ACCESS to Nancy.

And do we really think that the Spirit is going to appear in Nancy’s mother’s prized rose bush, all aflame, and go over the pro’s and con’s of releasing her number to us? No, that isn’t what we really want, even though that is sort of what we prayed for.

What we really want, sans prayer or wish, is to have Nancy say, suddenly and we hope uncharacteristically, to herself or a friend, “I’m going to give my phone number to Melvin Karpowitz, because he has the cutest butt in school. I hope he calls, because I have these urges I can’t control.”

When you really start to think about it, you can see what a slippery slope this is.

Remember what we said about the ethereality of wishes. With no depth, length or breadth, we have no real basis on which to make a judgment regarding the morality of a wish. In the realm of wishiness there is no difference between a Porsche and a bowl of popcorn; you’d have a hard time weighing the relative goodness or badness of the wish. Is it good for a hungry person to wish for a cheeseburger? What if they have no money? What if the cheeseburger they wish for is the one on your plate? What if a person who isn’t hungry wishes for a cheeseburger? Is that bad? And what about the impact of such a wish on your cholesterol? Does that make a wish bad?

And what happens if two people wish for the same thing at the same time? Does that increase the likelihood of it being granted? I know of many prayer circles, where people of deep spirit and genuine faith are convinced that the power of prayers increases exponentially when they are all cast into the universe at the same time. Is it the same with wishes?

I’m not sure. I still remember when Abbie Hoffman gathered 50,000 people at the Pentagon in the sixties to try to levitate it. Aside from two people in the crowd getting spontaneous hernias, the building didn’t move. Much.

You can see that this line of discussion is the equivalent of the angels dancing on the head of a pin contretemps.

So here is my wish.

I want to be on a Rolodex card, sitting on someone’s desk.

No fancy blackberries or hand held PDA’s for me; I want to be in a Rolodex.

I want someone to get on the intercom to their secretary, and say, “Marty, get me Menin, right now.”

They’ll want me because they have a job they know I can do. A problem they can’t solve. They’ll want me because “getting Menin,” means something positive, clearing a logjam, getting something off the ground, pulling the fat out of the fire. They want me because I match what they need.

They want me because something I have to offer is exactly what is missing. And they want me badly enough to reach across their desk, and fly through a Rolodex filled with the cards of insurance brokers from ten years ago, dry cleaners who’ve been out of business for fifteen years, the deli that stopped delivering last year.

And there I will be, the card still as clean and crisp as the day they put it in, a simple name and phone number, unused, waiting patiently for me to make this wish.