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It’s probably not a good idea to sit behind me at a restaurant. There are a ton of reasons for this, but the biggest one is that you might get salt thrown on you. When I was growing up, there was some sort of superstition about spilling salt and having to throw it over your shoulder to avoid some kind of curse I can’t quite remember. I also can’t remember which shoulder I’m supposed to throw the salt over. I think it’s the right shoulder, but just to be safe, I throw salt over both shoulders. After all, you don’t want a curse. I was subjected to quite a lot of superstitions growing up and I still at least try to practice them in my daily life, even if I can’t quite remember what they exactly are.

That’s the problem with most of the superstitions in my life. They become like a creepy game of “telephone.” I have bastardized the initial superstition into something that likely isn’t even close to what the original intention was. For example, I know our family had a superstition about putting shoes on the bed, or possibly the table. From what I recall, doing this would result in the death of a family member. Now I’ll be the first person to say it’s not especially sanitary to put your shoes on the table or the bed, so it should simply be a rule of thumb and not the promised death of a loved one.

You have to admit, the mention of death really drives home the point of keeping your shoes on the floor at all times though. This superstition actually becomes a pretty good motivator in this instance. You try to teach the kids not to put shoes on the table and making the threat of death is a pretty good way to encourage keeping your damn shoes off the damn table. It scares the piss out of the child, and thusly they keep their shoes off the table. I can see the funeral service now: “She was a loving aunt who would still be with us today if little Jimmy had kept his shoes on the floor where they belong.”

So, superstitions are a good learning tool and also a fine way to create obsessive-compulsive disorders in your children. There also used to be a superstition about having seven years of bad luck if you broke a mirror. I broke a mirror when I was eight and I have to say it really scared me. I also will say that the next seven years or so weren’t all that great for me. In all fairness, those particular seven years coincided with puberty and a general awkwardness that were likely more responsible for this downturn than any broken mirror. But still, those years might have been made a bit worse simply because I thought they would be.

Now that I’m older, I’m well aware how ridiculous these superstitions are. I still try not to mess around just in case, but I’m fairly sure most superstitions are about as accurate as a Georgia textbook on dinosaurs. It’s easy to see how they start though. Somebody sees a black cat cross in front of them and then minutes later their house burns down. Well, it’s plain to see that black cats are bad luck. Sure, you could blame the fire on faulty wiring or a cigarette left burning, but that puts some of the blame on the person. It’s far easier to blame a black cat and move on with your irresponsible life.

When I was playing football in high school, I got a new T-shirt to wear under my shoulder pads. It was just a gold colored shirt that was nothing special, but we won a game, so I kept wearing it because I believed the new garment was the source of the winning streak. The thing was, for some reason, I felt the shirt could not be washed or the luck would go away. We won about five or six games in a row, and that shirt got so freaking nasty I couldn’t even stand the smell of myself. My teammates also felt the shirt was insanely offensive, but they weren’t about to bitch about the lucky shirt.

We were winning, the shirt stunk to high heaven, and that was just fine with everyone. Winning became strangely associated with my stinky underwear, and everyone was cool with it so long as I didn’t stand close to them. It never occurred to us that the teams we were playing weren’t very good, or that we might even be getting better; it was easier to put all of the good fortune on the shirt. We eventually lost and were completely perplexed. How could the shirt let us down? Sure, the other team was big and fast and far more skilled, but we had the shirt. What the hell? I didn’t even keep the shirt after that, partly because it was disintegrating off my body, but mostly because it was now bad luck.

Superstition is weird. Every time I succumb to one, I have to tell myself that I’m better than that, but it still doesn’t quite register. There is a weird comfort in superstitions that takes some of the responsibility out of our hands. Sure, they may be crap, but is it really that big of a deal to throw some salt or wear the same shirt just to be on the safe side? Sure, I would like to just pretend superstitions don’t exist, but that’s gotta be really bad luck.