Very Superstitious
Very superstitious, writings on the wall
Very superstitious, ladders bout’ to fall . . . .
When you believe in things
That you don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way.
Superstitious by Stevie Wonder
Me? I respectfully choose to disagree with Mr. Wonder. I am very superstitious about some things. It’s the way I was raised.
Knock over the salt? Better throw some over your shoulder right away. See a ladder? Don’t walk under it. Step on a crack: break your mother’s back. And never, never break a mirror. That sets you up for seven years of bad luck. Luck is also why you must eat black-eyed peas, even if you only can get canned ones, on New Year’s Day . (I hated black-eyed peas with a passion growing up; that was a tough one for me).
This story starts in the fall of 1991 when my husband, then my boyfriend, asked me to marry him. I, of course, said yes and then went about the business of trying to find a date on the church calendar when we could wed.
I had always sworn I would never get married in the summer in Houston, Texas. I wanted a Christmas wedding. Like many teachers and professors, I like to plan big events and vacations around long holiday breaks.
A Christmas wedding was not in the cards, however. The church secretary and I finally settled on August 22, 1992. It wasn’t an ideal date; the Republican National Convention was running through August 21st, but I knew we could make it work.
When I told my fiancé that we had a date set, his first response was, “You watch. With our luck, a hurricane will hit that weekend.”
I looked at him in abject horror.
“What?” he asked. “What did I say?”
“Really?” I replied. “Really? Honey, I’m just going to say this one time, so listen carefully. Never, ever joke about hurricanes.”
“You’re kidding, right?” he asked, a Steve Dallas smirk on his face.
“No. I am not kidding. My family has a history of dealing with hurricanes, and we’re very superstitious. My mother and I were living with my grandparents near Corpus Christi when Hurricane Camille hit on August 16, 1969. I had just turned five. One of my friends lost her home and had to live in a trailer for months until her parents could rebuild. My grandfather had his hands full trying to hold down the fort and keep an eye on his oil wells (he was an AMOCO field superintendent) while my mother, my grandmother, and I waited out the storm in San Antonio. In August of 1983, when I was in London visiting my aunt and uncle and my stepfather was in Aruba on a business trip, Hurricane Alicia hit. My mother rode out the storm with my aunt, her baby, our cat, and our dog. Please don’t ever say anything like that again. EVER.”
“Well, okay,” he replied.
And that was that. Or so I thought.
At this point, I should, in his defense, explain that my husband is from Knoxville, Tennessee. He didn’t make it down here to the Gulf Coast until he was a sophomore in high school. Heck, he never even saw a raw oyster or a crawfish until his freshman year at Tulane University!
That’s why he just didn’t (and couldn’t) understand that those of us who were born and raised on the Gulf Coast NEVER, NEVER EVER joke about hurricanes.
As the wedding date approached, my fiancé continued to joke about the probability that our wedding would be ruined by the landfall of a tropical storm or a hurricane.
“Keep it up,” I said. “Just keep it up. When something bad happens, everyone’s going to blame you.”
He laughed it off.
That is, until the days leading up to our nuptials, when Tropical Depression Andrew became Tropical Storm Andrew, and Tropical Storm Andrew grew into Hurricane Andrew – on August 22, 1992.
Ironically, the weather on our wedding day in Houston was gorgeous. It wasn’t extraordinarily hot and humid as I had feared; it was, in fact, pleasant for a Houston summer day. I remember thinking how fortunate we all were as it was a 2:00pm service and the men in the wedding party were wearing morning coats.
The next day, we left our hotel and drove home to get our bags and our cat. We had plans to drop off the cat at my parents’ house before driving on to New Orleans for our honeymoon. By the time we reached my parents’ house, it was apparent that Andrew was going to make landfall in Florida. No one knew exactly where he was headed next.
So I decided to do what my family had always done in the past. I called the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio and asked for a reservation.
I have to say that we had a lovely honeymoon in San Antonio. It wasn’t New Orleans, but we were safe and dry. We counted our blessings and told ourselves that we’d see New Orleans another time.
Well, four years later, we decided to take a trip to South Padre Island for our fourth wedding anniversary. Our first day was wonderful. We swam in the surf, read trashy novels under a beach umbrella, and built a sand castle. The next day, when I woke up, my husband shared the bad news.
“Sweetheart,” he said, sitting on the side of the bed, “I hate to tell you this, but we have to leave and go back to Houston.”
“What?” I exclaimed. I couldn’t believe it. Surely he was joking.
He wasn’t joking. Hurricane Dolly was headed straight for the south Texas coast. We had to leave as soon as we could pack our bags.
On the way home, I reminded my husband that it was HIS fault this had happened.
“If only you had listened to me all those years ago,” I said. “Don’t joke about hurricanes. But no – you had to make a big joke about the possibility of our wedding day being ruined by a hurricane and tell everyone because you thought it was SO funny.”
“I’ve said I’m sorry a million times,” he replied from the driver’s seat.
My husband, bless his heart, had learned his lesson the hard way.
Skip forward to 2005 when Tropical Storm Katrina became Hurricane Katrina on August 23, 2005. Two days later, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city where we had once planned to spend our honeymoon.
But the coup d’état occurred last month when, three days after our 25th wedding anniversary, Hurricane Harvey turned the Houston metroplex into a morass of contaminated floodwaters replete with giant rafts of floating fire ants.
This time, I have to take the blame. You see, I broke my own rule. When the meteorologists started tracking Tropical Storm Harvey, I actually was foolish enough to write this post on Facebook:
OF COURSE there is a tropical storm headed our way – you can blame it on Craig Adams. It’s all his fault because when we set our wedding date 25 years ago, my sweet husband to be said, “Just watch – with our luck, a hurricane will hit that weekend.”
Shame on me. I should have known better.
Those who specialize in Folklore will tell you that superstitions are an important part of every culture. We may not know where a particular superstition was first believed or whether that belief was initially based in fact or on experience, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t to be taken seriously. As Dr. Alan Dundees, a professor at UC Berkeley explained many years ago in a New York Times article, “The meaning of these superstitions has often been lost to the conscious mind. . . . [However,] behavior doesn’t exist without meaning. People would not practice customs unless they meant something to the psyche.”
And that, my friends, is good enough for me.