It’s Friday the Thirteenth!

My father would be 106 today, if he were still with us. It’s also Friday the thirteenth and in fact he was born on a Friday the thirteenth. I looked it up once just in case this was just one of those family stories, and found it was true.

My parents also got married on a Friday the thirteenth.  I looked that one up, too. It was our family joke – Friday the thirteenth was our lucky day.

Given that in this, the wealthiest country in the world, a place full of supposedly educated people, hotels (and possibly many other tall buildings) do not include a thirteenth floor, deciding that Friday the thirteenth is your lucky day is a small rebellion. Or a small statement of sanity.

Or, at least, out of step. My family was always a little out of step.

There is always at least one Friday the thirteenth in a given year, according to math wizards. 1918, when my father was born, had two, though the year my parents got married only had one. Every once in awhile there are three.

So obviously a reasonable number of people are born on a Friday the thirteenth – probably about the same number as are born on a Friday the first or any other day of the month (except 29, 30, and 31, since there are fewer of those in a year).

I suspect fewer get married on Friday the thirteenth for the same reason that tall buildings label the thirteenth floor the fourteenth.

I currently live in an apartment building with 13 units. There is no apartment 13. The upper floors each have four units, numbered 1-12. The ground floor unit – which was unused and then renovated – is 14.

I find it hard to believe that a person who liked that unit (it’s a nice place, if small) and the location (walkable, near public transit, near lots of nice cafes and bookshops, not to mention libraries) would refuse to rent it because it was numbered 13, but even habits built on absurd superstitions that almost no one gives credence to anymore die hard.

If you look at some of the absolutely absurd things people in the United States believe, feeling a little nervous about Friday the thirteenth is at least a  harmless superstition.

I mean, there are people who don’t believe in vaccination or stopping the spread of contagious disease, just to bring up something very obvious right now.

And if you read some of the political news, you will find that there are people who believe in huge conspiracies to do horrific things to children, when in fact the biggest harm to children comes from poverty.

I note that many of the same people who believe in satanist cults out to kill and maim children are not willing to feed and educate and otherwise care for those same children.

Superstitious belief in conspiracy theories seems to blind people to the actual problems we face and how to fix them.

Like many people my age, I grew up reading Walt Kelly’s Pogo in the funny pages and I always loved it when he did a cartoon that said – essentially – Friday the thirteenth falls on a Wednesday this month.

Those cartoons date back to the late 1940s, so treating Friday the thirteenth as a joke is well-established and not just in my family.

I do wonder if continuing to pretend that 13 is unlucky and Friday the thirteenth exceptionally unlucky in a modern world does not set us up for believing more dangerous things that sound more plausible. It seems to me that a civilized country would not cater to such superstition.

But then, as I frequently note in my daily zentao senryu, we’re not civilized yet.

Anyhow, it’s Friday the thirteenth. I don’t plan to spend the day hiding under my bed.