Optatio (op-ta’-ti-o): Expressing a wish, often ardently.
I wished upon a star. Totally futile. No avail. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Have you seen beggar ride by on a horse lately? No. No way. “Your wishes will come true, it will happen to you if you’re young at heart.” Ha ha. More bullshit. “Watch out what you wish for,” I never quite understood this. Does it mean if you wish for a car, you’ll get run over? I have no idea.
Even though I never got anything I wished for in my whole life, I still made wishes. I know, pretty stupid. Actually, I’m more than stupid: my wishing was self-destructive. Why? Even though I didn’t believe in wishes, I was an ardent wisher. I lived in a sort of tension between disbelief and belief—in a contradicting twilight zone between a pair of contradictory terms. Our textbooks tell us that contraries can’t occupy the same conceptual space, at the same time, under the circumstances. That may be true of the physical world, but not my mental world.
In order to cope, I tried to stop wishing, but for each wish I wanted to stop wishing, I wished I could stop. This was a conundrum that went on forever: I wish to stop wishing, I wish I would stop wishing I would stop wishing, blah, blah, blah. At one point, I just said the hell with it, and decided to keep on wishing, even if none of the wishes ever came true. This was self destructive: it made my wishes insincere. It made made into a sham.
I told myself that now I was a big fake, I could make fake wishes that were beyond the pale. I could wish for made up junk—anything I could imagine. I even made up a “Wish Fairy” that I could petition with my bogus wishes. After I made up my mind, I made my wish:
“Dear wish Fairy, I speak from the bottom of my heart and depths of my soul, from the pinnacle of my desire, please, I wish for a duck with four wings.” There was a whoosh at my bedroom window. An elderly woman in a golden wheelchair flew in my window and landed softly on the floor by my bed. She was wearing a beautiful purple dress and a Diamond encrusted tiara. Her magic wand looked like a lead pipe with a star on the end of it. I was terrified. She said, “My name is Glenda. You may have seen me in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. I am now working as a Wish Fulfillment Specialist for The Powers That Be. Here’s your duck. Feed it mash once a day.” Her wheel chair lifted off, turned around and flew out my window with Glenda at the helm. “Good luck,” she yelled as she waved her wand.
Not only did the duck have four wings, it could dance. We worked up a repertoire and tried our act out at our town gazebo in the park. I named the duck King Kong and away we went: I sang the “Chiquita Banana” song on a karaoke machine while Kong flapped his wings and danced. Then, I would tell some duck jokes I got off the internet:
What time do ducks get up? The quack of dawn.
Why did the duck get detention? He couldn’t stop quackin’ jokes in class.
What’s a duck’s favorite taco topping? Quackamole!
The townspeople loved us, except for Marge Cramwell. She yelled “Witchcraft” and the applause abruptly stopped. Marge was a smelly old former teacher who had been fired from the local school for performing exorcisms on eight-year-olds. She was bitter because she had been fired for believing in fairies, imps, genies, and evil spirits and teaching her beliefs to children, and making them into her minions. Given my experience, I knew what she was saying was true, but I would never rat out Glenda: she had transformed my life, for free! So, I yelled “You’re stark raving mad!” The applause resumed and all was well.
The years flew by. King had I had a permanent gig at Caesar’s in Las Vegas. King’s getting old. I’m thinking of wishing for another duck. King could teach him the act, and then retire to a duck pond in a warm climate where he could spend his twilight years eating bread crusts floating on the water, tossed by kids and kind people. So, I decided to conjure another four-winged duck with a wish to Glenda.
The glass in my hotel bedroom window smashed. It was Marge Cramwell sticking her head through the hole in the glass wearing rock clmbing gear and yelling, “I’ve been watching you Devil Wisher!” I pushed her back out the window and she fell to her death on the pavement below. Back home, in the local newspaper it was called a “tragic accident” and possibly an “attempted burglary.”
Two days later, Glenda delivered my new duck. I named him “Goose.” King retired to very nice duck pond outside of Sarasota, Florida.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetorica” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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