DSP Blog Prompt from 4/13: Are you Superstitious?

Are you superstitious? Does the thought of 'Friday the 13th' make you nervous?

I am not superstitious but my grandmothers was, and a couple older people that I am really fond of are. Here are some of their superstitions that have either pained me or made me laugh:

1. My grandmother says if you sleep with a large white onion you will dream of your husband. She mad me do it for a week and it never worked, but I described some man I saw off TV just so I wouldn't have to sleep with the onion anymore.

2. When I was pregnant with my first I got snakebit. My grandmother had fits about it . She says if you are snakebit while you are pregnant the baby will be evil. She gave me a realllly hard time for the next four months, until he was born. Then she decided he wasn't so bad, after all.

3. My grandmother says that if a baby does not fall out of the bed before he is one year old, he will die before he is 7. When Kam was about 9 months old, my grandmother asked me if he'd fallen out of the bed yet. My response was, "Of course not, I watch him better than that." I guess I didn't watch him close enough, because she promptly went and pushed him off the bed. (I guess she'd decided he wasn't evil anymore and wanted to keep him around.) Luckily he doesn't remember it, and luckily the bed wasn't that high!!!!

4. My mother swore there was a family curse on all the women in our family---she said we were all destined to have our first child by the time we were fifteen. Her mother did, she did, my two sisters did---and I guess I broke it because I didn't have mine until I was seventeen. (Ok, I'm a little scared about this one. I have twin girls. I would have figured the medical community would have invented a birth control microchip by now...they still have about two years left before I really start to worry, or start dragging our chasity belts!!!)

5. I hate hiccups. They make me nauseous when I get them. My grandmother was the queen of hiccup rememedies:

a. Spit on a rock and turn it over. This does not work.
b. Have a tablespoon of Worchesterchire sauce. This works. Only because you choke to death from it.
c. Eat a tablespoon full of peanut butter. This does not work.
d. Pinch the victim's thumbnails and ask them stupid questions. (What is your name? How many toes do you have?) This works once. Don't ask me how, but it does, if they don't know what you are doing. It is awesome!

6. And the grand finale does not go to my grandmother, but to a lady who has been a friend of the family for years. She says if you really want someone dead, you can make it happen, but just once. Once is all you get. She's a great storyteller, (she has a millon ghost stories I'll post at some time, her stories REALLY need to be preserved) so I'm not sure how much truth is in this, but it's such a great story:
When she was younger, still a single mom, with two small boys.....the youngest boy's father came to her home one day when it was time for him to pick the child up for visitation. He'd decided that he was going to just Move to Florida. Just like that. She wasn't bothered by that, however, what bothered her was the fact that's he'd just decided to take the boy with him. There was arguments, of course, and she remembers watching him drive away, while she was standing at the screen door, stomping her foot and thinking, ' I wish you would just drop dead. We'd all be better off if you were just gone and weren't around to give me hell anymore.'
She got a phone call about thirty minutes later. The father had had a massive heart attack, while he was driving back to his home. He'd died in the car, the little boy in the car with him. Luckily they were on a side street, the car wasn't going very fast, and hit a stop sign which stopped the car, so the boy was okay.
She has never really gotten over it, and says she never ever ever would wish anyone dead ever again, even though she still believes you only get one wish!