Superstition Shmuperstition

I live with danger every day.  At least, some people think I do.  I am a superstition flouter.

Take chain letters and chain emails.  I hate those things.  It's easy to get one started.  All you need are a basic ability to write in a fairly coherent manner, a vivid imagination and several gullible friends.  That thing will go viral in about two days.  It's like a global game of Telephone.  By the time the letter gets around, enough has probably been added to or subtracted from it to make it even scarier than the original.  Get around it will, too, because, even with the non-superstitious, there is something in one corner of one little brain cell that says, "You will be toast if you don't pass this on to at least 20 people within the next 30 minutes."  So, just to be on the safe side, they pass the letter on and on and it ends up in my inbox.

I take one look, and delete it.  To prevent any evil from descending on me, I say a prayer.  Then I spend the next couple of weeks wondering if I'm going to be hit by a bus or come down with Bubonic Plague.

This is all you need to get a chain
letter traveling around the world.

Black cats are beautiful, and I would love to adopt one someday, if my present cat, Harmony (a brown tabby) allows it.  There's no living on the edge here.  Well, I take that back.  Living with any cat is living on the edge.  They are clever little critters, as well as being fast, limber, athletic and able to squeeze into small spaces and hide, and they take great pleasure in outwitting their humans.

A clever, fast, limber, athletic
creature plotting to outwit her
human

​I don't make a habit of walking under ladders, but that has nothing to do with superstition.  I just don't want any of them to fall on me.  If I'm in a crowd, though, and the fastest way to walk past people is under a ladder, I will walk under it, after first assessing how sturdy it looks and reassuring myself that I am not going to be flattened by collapsing metal followed by whoever is climbing the ladder when it falls on me.

I never throw salt over my shoulder.  I even forget why people do that.  It seems silly, because (1) it’s a waste of perfectly good salt, and (2) someone will just have to clean it up off the floor.  If I were the mother of the house, the roommate or the hostess, the salt thrower would have the choice of cleaning it up or getting more salt shoved up his nose.  At least, that’s what I’d be thinking while getting out the broom and dustpan.

I find it hard to believe that everybody in the whole world who was born under the sign of Pisces is going to have the same kind of day that I will have.  So why the daily horoscopes?

I could go on with this, but I think I have aroused some angry spirits with this post, and it’s better to quit while I’m still ahead.