Yes, I am superstitious. If I see my wife’s shoes on the kitchen table, I whisk them off to a chair. I won’t walk under a ladder, black cats bum me out, and I have tossed salt over my shoulder more than once.
I grew up in suburban Wyoming and Colorado, not rural Albania or the Transylvanian Alps. But it doesn’t matter — I am even superstitious about potentially missing a superstition I should be practicing.
The easiest explanation for this minor malady of mine is the enduring obsessive-compulsiveness that has afflicted me to varying degrees since I was a kid. It reached its peak when I was 11 years old. I lined up my shoes in neat rows and became fixated on touching and retouching a spot on a wall or on the ground.
My poor parents fretted, worried, pleaded and yelled at me to stop my obsessive behavior. They never took me to a doctor but I am convinced that if I had been born in 1978 instead of 1958, I would have been properly medicated and therapized in order to break me of my peculiar habits.
I’m still pretty bad today: There is no way I can lock my front door without rechecking it and I have to stand in front of the stove after I use it and literally recite out loud, “I shut it off. All burners are off.”
So superstitions may be my balm or source of relief, if you will, from the anxiety generated by obsessive compulsion. Removing shoes from a table or bemoaning black cats is a decisive way of putting ungrounded anxiety temporarily to rest.
Feel free to call me crazy or a little disturbed and, while you are at it, partly blame my late father for my mental aberrations. He was an equal opportunity believer in the exact logic of mathematics and engineering and the ominous intangibility of what he called “the fates.”
He loved to delve deep into the rituals and beliefs of ancient cultures and, far from branding those rituals as superstitions, he viewed them as attempts to define and understand the unexplained and undefined.
He even wrote a book titled, “The Fates,” and he would arch an eyebrow and wag a finger at me when he discoursed sagely on the great unknown.
Plenty of people who know and love both of us are shaking their heads as they read this column and saying, “Thor, you’re a little crazy, but your dad — he was 100 percent Grade A certified.”
I can’t disagree with them on either count. But I take comfort in superstition and I suggest superstitions have endured because they manage to defy logic. There is plenty we can explain and categorize but there is even more in our lives we can’t explain.
If you’re interested in testing that claim, just write down your dreams for a week. Put a notebook and pen by your bed and write down dream memories as soon as you awake. After a week, you will discover that the dreams that connect seamlessly with events in your life are outnumbered by the odd symbols and weird tangents your mind took during sleep.
Maybe superstitions are our way of warding off the sensations we experience when our dream world intersects with our daily lives. I don’t know, but I suggest keeping that salt shaker handy.
