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When the genie offers me three wishes, I’ll ask for gratitude. Let others squander my leftover wishes to fund their dreams or fix the world any way they like. As the one who cherishes whatever I may have, I’ll want for nothing and be immune to both the greed of others and their good intentions. This tepid bowl of chili won’t need sour cream, chopped red onion, fiery peppers, or shredded cheese once the genie has seasoned not it but me. And neither will I be deficient to myself. Already, darling, you and I own more than most humans have ever owned, and eat better, and savor it less. Even this mundane chili is richly exotic in most places on earth at any time other than ours. It’s we who fail the chili if it’s lacking. Taste it again more thoughtfully. Be the spice. You’re welcome. I may not be the ideal partner or even the ideal chef, but, for each other, if for no one else, we could both be. Of course, the genie will have the last laugh. Between the rubbings of the lamp, she has a thousand years to solve the riddle of every desire. However crafty my wish may seem—to live in pure appreciation—she’ll grant it only technically, as everyone knows, grant but not grant it. She could, for example, punish me for neglecting to protect what I already have. And I would surely suffer without your gratitude for my chili, if you catch my drift. It’s worth a second wish. Already I’m like an astronaut too long from home whose most exotic fantasy is lying beside you in our own bed whenever we’re not. If you felt that way about me, too, my first two wishes would do the work of three.
Wisdom is rare in adults. Those who have it made life impossible for everyone around them as children. We beat it out of the weak. It threatens us like joy. Like water balloons. Like youth. We want everyone to be old, and we don’t want to be wet. Or too dry. Or too anything. We want everything to be just so. We like to know where things are. Have you been to a grocery store? We’re obsessed with the size of the nuts. We think it measures worth. Are they colossal? Giant? Are they grand? (Grand is not a category of nut size, but if it were, we’d calibrate the right price for a grand nut and we’d pay it feeling righteous. Also—without telling you anything you don’t already know—we’d pay more for a grand nut to a place that would gift-wrap, and even more to a place that would gift-wrap and call a “grand nut” a “colossal nut.”) Nuts are sold in a round cardboard foil-lined container wrapped in the image of a friendly man who loves nuts, and veracity, and a square deal, and whose name is inoffensive, goofy even, maybe just initials. (And a reclosable plastic lid.) When he says “Honey Roasted Nuts” with “real honey” we should all be unnerved by what else “honey” might mean, and cheapened. But instead, we’re grateful for our paychecks. We’ve matured. “Honey-roasted nuts” in quotes is the least of what we’ve swallowed. The nuts cost a dollar ninety-nine in a package that would retail for a dollar and a half. Hardly nuts at all. Barely protein. They’re mean small fragments of nut meat that deliver salt and sugar. God bless them. Good from nothing. If we had found them, roasted them, seasoned them ourselves, we’d be heroes.
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