Desperately Seeking Christy - NYTimes.com It was 2007, and like anyone else with a yoga mat and a DVR set to record "Oprah," my sister, Donna, and I were reading "The Secret," the best-selling self-help book by Rhonda Byrne that espoused the cosmic "law of attraction." Filled with the usual platitudes of the genre, it also held out this tantalizing promise: Whatever you desired - a better relationship, a fatter paycheck - you could draw into your life with the magnet of your mind. You just had to concentrate on what you wanted as if it were already on its way. Donna and I agreed it amounted to magical thinking, but we were both hovering around 30, our romantic lives stalled, our bank accounts anemic; we were angsty and longing for more. Who were we to thumb our noses at a little magical thinking? "What we need is a test," Donna said one night. While we could tick off a list of worthy contenders - a Manhattan penthouse, the romantic attentions of a literary John Stamos-type - my sister worried those might be too grandiose to "secret" on our first try. It had become a verb! We needed to start with something emotionally low-risk yet readily identifiable if we were to be successful in our hocus-pocus. My eyes fell to the yoga book on her coffee table, its author gazing serenely from the cover. I know: Let's secret Christy Turlington! Donna's eyes flickered with intrigue. We considered the author photo, itself the gauzy embodiment of what we longed for - all inner peace and toned yoga arms - and decided to try to attract a "90s supermodel into our lives. My sister tacked pictures of Turlington around her apartment the way our mother once tucked prayer cards of Pope John Paul II around our childhood home. I visualized Turlington before bedtime and spent my commute imagining our conversation ("That's my favorite yoga pose, too!"). During my commute, I thought nice thoughts about her, giving her mental props for her social activism, her shiny hair. At least, I tried. Problem was, outside the experiment, I was pretty neutral on matters Turlington. My mind wandered during my secret-ing rituals, and I had to downgrade to repeating her name, mantra-like: Chris-ty Tur-ling-ton. Chris-ty Tur-ling-ton. "This is stupid," I phoned my sister to report after two days. I feel like I'm stalking a celebrity. With my mind. Actually, it felt more than stupid; it felt wrong. And not for obvious reasons. A product of strict Polish-Catholic upbringing, I learned early which matters were appropriate to take up with a higher power. On that point, my Catechism teacher had been clear: safety, guidance, forgiveness. The thrill of having your crush notice you in the hallway? Don't bother, she said. Our parents reinforced this modesty of desire, passing down the belief that there was something inherently greedy, even sinful in being so audacious with longing. My sister and I learned to trim back the overgrowth of our ambitions, to keep our dreams small. But now Christy Turlington was opening us up to other possibilities. Even as our passion for the experiment eventually waned, we began to peel back the suffocating layers of our youth, to let out the seams of our snugly tailored dreams. Turlington became, for us, something of a private symbol. (Me: I'll never be able to get that job. Donna: Christy Turlington!) Our weeks with her taught us that living expectantly of good fortune wasn't greedy; it brought a lightness of being that wasn't even dependent on those fortunes coming true. And maybe, given time, some magic would happen. A few years later, I was living in downtown Manhattan and happily married (to a man my sister insists I secreted) when I decided to indulge my fantasy of joining a high-end exercise studio. I knew I couldn't afford it, but why not indulge the dream with a tour? I visited the swanky facility, feeling giddy with possibility as I got back on the elevator to leave. "Can you hold that?" someone called. I pressed the "door open" button for a tall woman still glistening from her workout. Her smile was bright, and her eyes met mine. We ended up walking together for a few blocks, comparing notes about exercise studios and the neighborhood, in which, it turned out, she also lived. "Well, nice meeting you," she said, our paths finally diverging. You're going to love this neighborhood. Hopefully you join the studio! Then we parted ways. Through it all, my knees were rubbery. There was no way Christy Turlington could have known it wasn't because I was star-struck. Joann Klimkiewicz is a digital producer at New York Public Radio. She's at work on her first novel, about three generations of Polish-American women.