"Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit"-R.E. Shay

In Sunday School, we talked about superstitions and charms and I started thinking about where the idea of getting good luck from an object and getting bad luck from an action came from in the first place. Good luck charms are fairly easy to figure out. If you have something with you when a good thing happens, then you may assume the object led to the good thing. I don't really know why you'd be walking around with rabbit's feet though, unless you were starving and the rabbit was dinner. That might be a lucky break for you, but then I would think carrying around the severed limbs of your prey would scare away any future dinners. I've never tried hunting rabbits with or without lucky rabbit's feet, so I wouldn't really know either way.

Superstitions about bad luck seemed senseless to me, but when someone in class listed walking under a ladder as a common belief, a light bulb went on in my head. Perhaps these false notions have some pretty logical roots. For instance, the time I walked under my own ladder, I knocked a tray of turquoise paint off of it. While I don't anticipate 7 years of bad luck from the incident, I do have some bright little reminders of it on the carpet. And if I don't see the paint spots, I have a husband who will be glad to point them out to me...for as many years as the carpet remains. Maybe a truer sign of things to come would be "if you don't use a drop cloth, you'll have 7 years of bad luck."

I wasn't sure about the logic of not crossing paths with a black cat. I grew up near an elderly lady with a ton of cats though, and it got me thinking that maybe the ones who first came up with that superstition were kids with a crabby old cat neighbor. Then they would have warned each other, "if you get anywhere near that black cat, Mrs. Cranky will come out and yell at you. Good luck there, pal!" Then there's the one about breaking a mirror. Your level of bad luck will ultimately be reflected in WHOSE mirror you break. Some people are likely to hold that over you for years. If you're a teenage boy and it happens at your friend's house, you may need more than luck to get invited back over. A mom will forgive her own child for breaking her things, but if she's not your mama, don't break her mirror.

I'm not entirely graceful, and I've broken a few mirrors in my time. I doubt it's caused any bad fortune in my life. Unless...maybe the breaking of the mirror resulted in me being cursed with clumsiness rather than the clumsiness leading to the breaking. Hmmm. If that's the case, I better start looking for a good luck charm after all. Given my normal string of "bad luck." I'm thinking crash helmet, steel-toed boots, safety goggles are all good choices.