By Chris Cosci

What are druthers? Everybody wants them, and nobody seems to have any. You'll hear people say, "If I had my druthers..." Then they go on about what they can accomplish if they had these mythical druthers. "If I had my druthers, I'd be laying on a beach in Puerto Rico instead of sitting in this office."

These druthers must be powerful items indeed. Depending on the person, these druthers could make people look like glamorous supermodels, transport people to secluded hideaways, and make people earn money by sitting on their couch watching television. It's no wonder people are always wishing for them.

So how do we find these elusive druthers? And why do we always need more than one? We never say, "If I had a druther." You'll never find a record of anybody looking for just one druther in the annals of history. You could try, but you'll have to search through the entire annals of history, because you can't have just one annal, either.

What if all we really need is a single druther? We'd be wasting our time looking for multiple druthers, when just one would suffice. Or maybe we should just accept that fact that we will never have druthers.

Perhaps to make up for this lack of druthers, people feel the need to invent new items they have that don't really exist. For example, the cockles of our heart. I'm not an expert in anatomy, but I don't ever remember learning about having cockles in my heart. We often claim how touching situations can warm these cockles, but what exactly are they?

According to the dictionary, there are two different types of cockles: one is a weedy plant, the other is a family of mollusks similar to clams and mussels. Call me crazy, but I hope somebody would tell me if I had weedy plants or stray shellfish floating around in the chambers of my heart.

Maybe we just need to run some tests or take some x-rays to look for cockles in our heart. Of course, we might not want to know the results if they actually found cockles living there. If they did, we would probably lose yet another imaginary object that we have a hard time keeping: the bejesus.

Unlike druthers, everybody seems to have a bejesus. It probably hangs around the heart playing games with the cockles. But unlike the cockles, the bejesus seems to have a very weak attachment to the body, as people often talk about how it was scared right out of them. Maybe the bejesus is a type of fluid that sweats out of our pores when we're frightened.

Whatever it is, we just can't seem to keep it inside. And apparently, it keeps coming back, because we tend to keep losing it over and over again. Maybe the bejesus is scared out so that other, more important items in our body stay put. After all, it would probably be dire to our health if when something shocks us, one of our lungs was scared out of us.

So I guess we should be thankful for having a bejezus to prevent us from losing our more vital body parts. Still, I would rather not have to worry about losing any part of my body - let alone my bejesus. If only I had my druthers.