Mom's Superstition Rule Book

They didn't issue me a superstition rule book when I born! How was I supposed to know?

As a child, I would often think this as my mother was having fit over yet another one of my transgressions against one of her many unwritten rules which all came under the heading of "Things One Should Not Do Because They Invite Bad Luck".

My mother was born in the Ozarks of southern Missouri on the same land her father's grandfather from Tennessee had homesteaded, served as Presiding County Judge during the Civil War and where his succeeding four generations of sons saw their first light of day.

My maternal grandfather worked for the railroad all of his life and my mother was still an infant when, to gain a job promotion, my grandfather moved his entire family off to the tiny central Montana town in which my mother was raised. When she was in her early teens, her father moved the entire family back to the homestead in Missouri. This was devastating to my mother who was forced to leave behind her friends back in Montana along with the only home she'd ever really known.

Mom was the product of a large family with a respected heritage. She was extremely intelligent, quick-witted, well-educated and had, upon occasion, an acid tongue that could rip you to shreds if you made the mistake of crossing her and winding up on her bad side. She converted to Buddhism, rarely raised her voice and had a love of all things modern -- furniture, art, and clothing.

My mother and I were so unalike -- I would have been happier, by far, to have been born during the Victorian era surrounded by lace, flowers and frilly Valentines. At heart, though, Mom was an "Ozarkian" with Ozarkian ways but, more than that, she had enough hillbilly superstitions to fill a book.

I remember one occasion when I was a very, very small child and my mother bought me a new umbrella. I remember playing with it -- as any child would do -- in the living room of our rented duplex. Most of all, I can still remember my mother's ear-splitting scream after she returned from the kitchen to find that I'd opened the umbrella and was twirling it on my shoulder.

She raced across the room and grabbed the umbrella from me. "What are you doing?" she screamed as she closed it, "You never, ever open an umbrella in the house!"

To a child, this behavior made absolutely no sense at all. . .

"Why not?" I asked -- taken aback by her sudden outburst.

"You just don't!" she retorted curtly.

But, like most children, I found this type of answer most unsatisfactory and, after pressing her several more times for a valid explanation, she muttered, "It's just bad luck, that's all. . ."

Even as a child, I found it difficult to resolve the dichotomy that my mother and this person with the intense, overpowering belief in superstitions were one and the same human being. . .

On the one hand, here was a woman who: Dug abstract art, took me at age seven to see the movie "Irma La Duce" (a film that barely squeaked by the censors), took me each year to the Grant Avenue Art Festival in San Francisco (where designer Rudy Greinrich unveiled the first "topless bathing suit"), thought the Beatles were "cute" (unlike 90% of the other parents at that time), strung her own "love beads" in the 60s and marched in an anti-war protest beforeI did.

On the other hand, there was this other woman who maintained an entire volume's-worth of silly, backwater superstitions inside her head. The strangest thing was that they both bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother!

It never did make any sense to me. . .

The "umbrella incident", however, couldn't hold a candle to the "bird in the house incident", later on, when I was about twelve years-old or so:

A little sparrow somehow got inside our apartment one afternoon. The poor little thing flew from room to room in a panic, bumping into walls and flinging itself against window panes. The bird's panic was nothing, however, compared to the frenzied state my mother was in as she ran after it, screeching, "Oh God! There's a bird in the house! A bird! Quick, get it out! Get it OUT of the house, NOW!"

I was finally able to throw a towel over the bird and take it outside where I released it. It flew away to live another day but I wasn't so sure about my mother. . .

She collapsed, panting and trembling, on the sofa afterwards and I questioned her about her rather excessive, little display. She replied that a bird in the house was a sure sign someone in the family was going to die soon and, since she and I were the extent of our family unit at the time, the thought terrified her.

Over the years of living with my mother, I learned a veritable dearth of superstitions:

• Never go back into a house once you've left to go someplace -- but, if you do have to go back inside to retrieve something, always enter and leave through the same door.
• Never "rock" a rocking chair if no one is seated in it (another portend of a death in the family).
• If you find the hem of your skirt accidentally flipped up, you have a letter in the post office.
• If you drop a fork on the floor, you will have a male visitor soon -- a spoon, a female one -- and the visitor will come from the direction in which the handle is pointing but, never, ever drop a knife. (I'm not sure what happens if you do, I just made sure not to drop any knives -- ever).
• If a post, pole, parking meter or other object comes between two people as they're walking side-by-side, they must both say "bread and butter" as quickly as they can after they pass it.
• Always, always pick up any penny that you see lying on the ground. 
• Don't walk under an open ladder.
• A black cat crossing your path is fine but never let a rabbit do so.
• Never take an old broom to a new house when you move, always buy a new broom for the new place.
• Get up early on New Years Day because it sets the tone for the entire year that follows so you must get a lot of things accomplished on that day and you must eat black-eyed peas on New Years Day, as well.
• Never sweep or vacuum under someone's feet because, if you do, that person will never marry.
• Don't wear opal jewelry because losing an opal is bad luck and opals shrink and expand with differences in temperature, so they're very easy to lose.
• Always wear a carnation on Mother's Day. If your mother is living, wear a red one and, if your mother has passed on, wear a white one.
• Always tear a piece of bread in half before eating it.
• If you accidentally spill some salt, you must throw a pinch of it over your shoulder (although, I can never seem to remember which shoulder it is -- left or right).

I know there were others but they have escaped me for the moment. . .

So, I thought I'd take this opportunity to jot down as many of mother's superstitions as I could remember and publish them here just in case there's another child -- somewhere out in "cyberland"-- who's presently living with a superstitious parent or two and might have need of a "superstition rule book" right about now. . .

No charge...