Friday the Thirteenth

Today is Friday, the 13th. As a child, I wasn't superstitious about it at all. It seemed of no more significance than Monday the 13th or Tuesday the 13th or any other day of the week. But apparently enough people dread Friday the 13th for it to be a major superstition and the topic of a series of horror movies.

Mom was superstitious but not about Friday the 13th. She had superstitions imported from Greece, brought by her mother to the new world. Nona, as we called my maternal grandmother, believed in the power of dreams, and had all sorts of interpretations at the ready. By contrast, my grandfather, Papoo, scoffed at this and said that if you had vivid dreams it meant you must have kicked off the blankets and slept with your buttocks uncovered.

Mom learned the superstition that cats were ghosts. She had a few bad experiences with cats anyhow, so she feared them and it was difficult for her to warm up to a cat. She also learned that if you said too much good about a person, you would give them a "Kinohorah" which meant the evil eye. So it was better to say modest and even negative things about a person so as not to attract the jealousy and malice of the evil eye. If you did have to compliment someone, you followed it with, "Poo, poo, poo," in order to drive the evil eye away.

Mom, although highly intelligent and well-read, retained other superstitions from her childhood as well. She believed in witches and we were not allowed to throw hair or finger and toenail clippings into the garbage, in case a witch found them and put a spell on us. Instead, all clippings from the human body had to be flushed down the toilet, to keep them safely away from witches. I guess Mom did not believe in the Sea Witch who aided "The Little Mermaid" in her quest to become human and marry her prince, or else we might have had to burn our nail clippings instead.

Another superstition that I ended up retaining was that you never handed another person a sharp object. Now as a safety measure we are all taught to hand it over with the handle facing the other person so that they will not grasp the blade and get cut. But Mom's superstition dictated that if you handed a sharp object to a person at all, it would cause a fight between you (the relationship would be "cut"). So if we needed to pass a knife or a pair of scissors we had to lay it down on a surface near the person who needed it, and let them pick it up on their own. I still do this today because I have a mental image of Mom scolding me if I don't observe this one. Also when giving a gift of knives to a newlywed couple, it was important to scatter a few pennies into the box with the knives so as to avoid a falling out with them.

But with all these other superstitions, I never learned to dread Friday the 13th until I lost the only two jobs I have been terminated from in my life, and both times it happened on a Friday the 13th. The first time, I was working at Matthew Bender, writing on family and matrimonial law. We had a new person take over our floor, and unfortunately I made the mistake of engaging in negative gossip about her to a tattletale who ran right to her with this information. Back then I was a good worker but knew very little about office politics. Today, I'm a lot better at keeping my mouth shut.

This didn't lead directly to my firing but it set the groundwork. The new manager of our floor set out to clean out the "third floor bolsheviks" who had protested holding our Christmas party at a private club that had a history of excluding blacks and Jews. I was one of the people who signed that petition; therefore I was targeted. She also cut out some of the abuses going on on our floor, with practicing attorneys running their own side business on company time and having clients up to see them when they were supposed to be working on publications. I can't fault her for that one. Third, she targeted people who'd been with the company a while and had risen to a reasonably high salary, in order to push us out and bring in law school graduates who would be happy to work for $17,000 a year instead of commanding salaries in the mid-30's.

So with all this going on, she built a case against me and had me dismissed, supposedly for poor work. As the man in the unemployment office laughed, "It took them five years to figure out you couldn't do your job? Ha!" I knew it was coming sometime but in June of 1984 Luke Skywalker was depicted on my Star Wars calendar. When I turned the page at the start of July and saw that there was a photo of Darth Vader and a Friday the 13th in the month, I knew that my time was short. Sure enough, I was let go on Friday the 13th.

The second firing took place a little over a year later. I found a legal editor position with a firm called Brownstone Publishers. At that time, the two owners of the company interviewed potential employees by hiring them. In the six months I worked there, there was a great deal of turnover for such a small company. Instead of supporting and guiding new hires, we were thrown into the fray and expected to come up with a brilliant newsletter on unfamiliar areas of law. I made a valiant stab at learning co-op and condominium law in order to write my assigned newsletter, but soon my superiors found fault with it, and after six months they let me go with only one warning and no attempt to help me do better.

Mom particularly resented this firing because not only did it take place on Friday, September 13, 1985, but it occurred right on Erev Rosh Hashonah (the eve of the Jewish New Year). Mom was incensed that one of the partners, a Jewish man, would fire a Jewish employee right at the start of the New Year. I didn't particularly care about that but this second episode on a Friday the 13th solidified my feeling that Friday the 13th was a day to dread.

Over the years this feeling has dissipated somewhat as nothing else too dramatically bad has happened on a Friday the 13th for me or my family. So now I view it two ways. In a sense it was bad luck to get fired twice on two separate Fridays the 13th. But as they say, one door closes and another door opens. If I hadn't been let go twice from legal publishing positions I would not have moved into the development field where I have done better and enjoyed my work much more. So maybe Friday the 13th is a lucky day after all.