The Wishing Tree

Last night I had dinner with Lucy and another friend from high school, Kristine. After we ate, we wandered into the courtyard outside the restaurant and found 21 live, potted crape myrtles covered with tiny slips of white paper; written on each slip was someone's wish. It's an art installation that's part of a larger project that Yoko Ono is doing in memory of John Lennon, and eventually all the wishes will be collected from Pasadena and other places and placed in some sort of time capsule on an island off the coast of Iceland. We had fun reading the various wishes. Most of them asked for happiness, world peace, and/or good health; a great many of them revealed people's choices for the upcoming election (Obama seemed to be favored, thank god). A few of them, however, were a little more idiosyncratic:

I wish for the forestry management job to come through.
I wish I was a scratch golfer.
I wish for a monkey.
I wish I could get a job and a place to live.
I wish the voices in my head would start speaking English. I don't understand Chinese.
Michelle get single!
I wish McCain wins, dies & makes Palin president.
I wish to get lucky tonight.
I wish John Lennon was alive.
World peace and $18,000,000.
I wish that I get a snake from Petco.
I wish that I could go skydiving.
To not have man boobs!
I wish to be Batman!
I wish my boyfriend had a bigger penis. (On the back, in different handwriting, was written, "I hope he finds out you wished this.")
I wish my kids would go to Harvard.
I wish for another pineapple sandwich.
A man would be nice!!!
I wish I could wear short skirts.

Visitors were invited to add their own wishes to any of the trees, so I grabbed a slip of paper and wrote down what was on my mind at the moment: "I wish I could lose 70 lbs and keep it off forever." When I showed Lucy what I'd wished for, she asked to borrow my pen, and she wrote at the bottom, "Me, too!"