I'm a surveyor with the county. I'm 53, and I have been measuring land in and around Dayton since 1976. A surveyor writes down what he finds, not what he expected to find, and he writes it down the same day. That habit is the whole explanation for this page.

On Friday, March 15, 1985, my wife Elaine and I went out for supper at the Peony Garden, a Chinese restaurant on the north side of town where we'd been going every other Friday for some years. At the end of the meal I opened my cookie, and it said:

So I did. I put it in my shirt pocket and when I got home I put it in an empty shoebox from a pair of work boots, and I wrote the date on the inside of the lid. Two weeks later I kept that one too. By the fall I had started writing each fortune down in a field book, the small hardbound kind we use on the job, with the date, the restaurant, the fortune, the lucky numbers, and a space for the result. Fourteen and a half years later the shoebox holds 412 slips in order, rubber-banded by year, and the field book is on its third volume.

Elaine thinks this is the strangest thing about me, and she has known me since 1968, so she has a lot to choose from.

1. Restaurant cookies only. A bag of fortune cookies from the grocery store is a snack, not a fortune.
2. One cookie per meal, and it's the first one my hand touches. No switching. No reaching across.
3. Elaine's cookies are Elaine's. They don't go in my box. (One of hers is written up below, with her permission.)
4. It goes in the field book that same night, word for word, with its lucky numbers.
5. A fortune is graded when the facts are in, and regraded if the facts change. A Not Yet can move. Came True and Never are final.
6. Advice is graded on what happened when I took it. If I didn't take it, it stays Not Yet.
7. Statements of plain fact are graded as true or false, and the true ones are kept in their own column, so they don't flatter the numbers.
8. Elaine may appeal any grade. She has appealed eleven. She has won four.

Adjusted for statements. Twenty-six of the 412 slips weren't predictions at all but statements, like "You are a person of uncommon common sense." Twenty-three were true, and they're in the Came True column; three were false, and they're in Never. Take the 23 true statements out of Came True and the 26 statements out of the total, and the fortunes that actually predicted something came true 47 times out of 386. That's 12.2 percent.

Generous version. If each Sort Of counts as half, the box comes to 70 plus 40½, or 110½ out of 412: 26.8 percent. Elaine prefers this number. I report both, because that's how it's done.

For comparison. The weatherman on television is right a good deal more often than that, and I keep no shoebox for him.

Nineteen fortunes in the box have promised me travel. I should say up front that since March of 1985 the farthest I have been from Montgomery County is Columbus, about seventy miles, for meetings. I have been to Columbus several times. Every travel fortune is graded against Columbus.

Most slips have lucky numbers on the back. I ignored them for five years. Then, on my birthday in March of 1990, Elaine pointed out that I had been testing the front of every fortune and none of the backs, which for a man who prides himself on thoroughness was, she said, "sloppy." She was right. Since that night I have played the numbers from every slip that has them, one ticket, one dollar, on the state lottery's next six-number drawing.

Two numbers pays nothing. The first set I ever played, from No. 0143, was 4, 11, 17, 23, 30 and 38, and it matched none of the six. That fortune said, "Your efforts will bring a reward you can count." The reward could be counted. It was zero. I graded it Never, and I've played every set since, and I'll keep playing them, because a survey with a gap in it isn't a survey. Over nine and a half years that's about 50 cents a week, which Elaine says is less than I spend on the newspaper and more than the newspaper has ever paid me back, either.

These are the 26 statements, the slips that predict nothing and only tell you something about yourself, or about the room. They're easy to grade. A few of the plainest:

Elaine has opened about as many cookies as I have since 1985. She reads hers out loud, says "Isn't that nice," and leaves the slip on the plate. She has kept exactly one. In April of 1991 her cookie said:

She put it in her wallet. On Sunday, May 19, 1991, her ticket was drawn in the church quilt raffle, and she won a queen-size double wedding ring quilt, blue and yellow, which is on our bed right now. The slip is still in her wallet, behind her library card.

So her record stands at one fortune kept, one fortune come true: 100 percent. Mine is 17.0. She mentions this whenever I bring out the shoebox, and since I bring out the shoebox fairly often, she mentions it fairly often. It's the one slip I've agreed to list here that isn't mine, and I graded it myself, by the rules. Came True, no squinting.

People ask me this, as if keeping the slips made me an expert on the cookie. It doesn't, and I'd mark everything in this paragraph "approximate." The story generally told is that the fortune cookie as we know it got its start in California, early in this century, rather than in China. San Francisco and Los Angeles have both claimed it, and some accounts say it was Japanese-American bakers who were making them first, before Chinese restaurants took them up. I've also read that in China itself they're hardly known. I can't vouch for any of it personally. I have not been to China. I have been to Columbus.