Can’t Touch That

As I write this posting it’s Friday the 13th, which many people superstitiously consider to be an unlucky day. I, however, am bulletproof against bad luck, since I had pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day.

There are people who might say that starting a new year with sauerkraut is itself an invitation to bad luck, but this New Year’s Day meal has a long tradition in my originally small town, rural Midwest family. When I was a kid we had it nearly every year that I can remember, and there would be some anxiety if it looked like we wouldn’t have it. We could be doomed for the entire year! I carried the tradition forward while my own children were growing up, but some of them are not sauerkraut fans. There was some egregious bribery that went on to get them to at least put a piece of sauerkraut on their tongue; they didn’t even have to swallow it. Deals were made, and some atavistic part of my cultural inheritance could relax.

Many traditions develop out of cultural superstitions, and sometimes there’s an uneasy feeling of having caused the bad luck in the first place. I have numerous childhood recollections of someone saying, “It’s bad luck to ….”, the premise being that if you kept your head down the bad luck wouldn’t find you. Since I’m a member of modern Western culture, I ignore most such bad luck warnings these days. However: I love black cats but I won’t walk under a ladder, since some behaviors just ask for trouble. If I spill the salt I don’t throw even more of it over my left shoulder, but I do knock on wood when necessary. (That’s if I can find some actual wood on which to knock; faux wood isn’t going to help in the bad luck avoidance area.) It’s just good sense to avoid the problem rather than having it come back to bite you, black cats notwithstanding.

Anyway – I’m heading out now to get my sprained ankle checked. It turns out someone spilled salt all over the kitchen floor and then in an overabundance of caution threw down a bunch more after it. They might as well have scattered marbles everywhere. I was chasing the cat (yes, it’s black) to take away its dead mouse and it ran under the step ladder being used to change a light bulb in the kitchen. I was intent on retrieving the dead mouse and unthinkingly followed the cat under the ladder, which happened to be placed in the middle of the salt marbles, so I guess I made my own luck there.