It’s rained nearly every day for the last three weeks. Some days it only rains a little bit and then remains overcast for the rest of the day…then others it pours and pours all day long. Thunder, lighting, the whole bit. Some days the storms blow over and the sky clears up for a few hours, only to start all over again in the afternoon or the evening.
All this rain has got me to thinking about luck—one of those things that logically I know I shouldn’t believe in but that I just can’t stop myself from buying into. I happen to be rather superstitious. I don’t know how this came to be…neither of my parents are particularly wary of superstitions and I didn’t grow up thinking that all hell would break loose if a black cat crossed my path. And yet, somehow over the course of the last twenty-five years, I have become a fairly cautious, superstitious person.
During training, I got stuck in the rain one day without an umbrella (a stupid thing not to pack when moving to a foreign country, by the way) and ended up running into the bazaar to buy one. My friend Melissa and I stepped into a small shop selling scarves, umbrellas, and other assorted goods. The shopkeeper grabbed the umbrellas we’d seen in the window and proceeded to pop them open inside to show us that they were, in fact, good quality umbrellas (come to find out, they were not of the best quality). This is a pretty common thing to do here in Ukraine. When buying something at a store or bazaar, shopkeepers often open it up to show you that whatever you’re buying works. They’ll screw lightbulbs into a little portable socket in order to prove that they’ll light. And they open umbrellas inside in order to assure you of the quality.
While I appreciate this gesture, I can’t help but flinch when people open umbrellas indoors. After Melissa and I bought our bazaar umbrellas, we went home. I walked into my host mother’s apartment and I left the umbrella in the doorway like I’d like an umbrella at home in America—sitting upside down, partially closed, but not wrapped up, so that it would still dry out by the next day. Later on, I came into the living room only to find that my host mother had opened my umbrella up and propped it against the wardrobe to dry.
The next day, I ended up showing up for my first lesson at the university four hours early. I got splashed by a bus driving through a massive puddle on my walk to school. My black dress pants were speckled with mud and my shoes and socks were soaked all the way through from the rain. I ran out of money on my phone, so I couldn’t call anyone to tell them my situation and was stuck waiting in the teacher’s lounge for four hours. While I sat there, I watched teachers come in and out. At one point, I observed a conversation that, although in Russian, I understood to be about umbrellas, because all the teachers stood up and started popping open their umbrellas to show them off. I had to resist a very intense urge to stand up and shut all their umbrellas, to explain to them that they were just bringing themselves and, potentially me, more bad luck. I’m not sure if luck works by proximity, but it’s something I’m not particularly interested in taking chances with.
Now…I know you’re probably rolling your eyes right now and thinking “showing up four hours early for class isn’t really bad luck”…and “that silly girl got splashed by a bus because it was raining and she was walking on a narrow sidewalk. It’s her own fault for not wearing better footwear.”
Well. You’re probably right. But whatever. As far as luck is concerned, I believe that it’s better to err on the side of caution so that, in case bad luck does exist, you won’t end up a victim. It’s easy enough to walk around a ladder, rather than walk under it…black cats generally have at least a little tuft of white on them somewhere, rendering them harmless. And if they are completely black, usually you can meander out of their way so that they don’t walk in front of you. And it’s not like breaking mirrors is something many people do on a regular basis.
Here’s the tricky part, though. What do you do when you move to a new country and you encounter a new set of superstitions? Are you still bound by your own superstitions? Or are they obsolete when not on their own home turf? And worst of all, what do you do when one of your superstitions contradicts a common superstition in your new home??
It reminds me of this scenario: they say that toast always lands butter side down…and cats always land on their feet. So what happens if you tie a piece of toast, butter side up, to the back of a cat and toss the cat out the window?
During training, our Language and Cross-Cultural Facilitator told us that it is considered bad luck to pick up a coin on the ground in Ukraine. Needless to say, I was immediately willing to give up my tendency to look twice at anything shiny lying on the ground. But then, upon further consideration, I began to wonder what this meant for me, bearing my own superstitions in mind. I happen to believe that it’s good luck to pick up a penny if it’s lying heads up. So what was I to do if I saw a coin, lying heads up on the ground? Was it still bad luck to pick it up? And if the coin isn’t a penny (and happens to be a kopek, for example) are there still “heads” and “tails” to look for anyway? It took no small amount of effort to quit looking at coins on the ground as potential bearers of extra cash and good luck, but I decided that it was best just not to pick up any coins. At least that way I definitely wasn’t chancing any bad luck.
Several of my Ukrainian students and colleagues have since told me that they’d never heard it was bad luck to pick up coins from the ground, so I suppose I could relieve myself of this superstition…but they did tell me a few things that are guaranteed to bring bad luck. Here’s the list of things I’m currently aware of that can bring you bad luck:
- Crossing a street with empty buckets
- Crossing paths with somebody who’s crossing a street with empty buckets
- Going back inside to get something you’ve forgotten after you’ve already walked out the door (easy neutralization: sit down for one minute once you get back inside or look in a mirror)
- Sitting at the corner of a table (seemingly exclusive to women. Committing this offense will mean you’ll never get married/you won’t marry for at least seven years, depending on who you ask)
- Finishing a beer bottle (maybe any bottle?) and leaving it empty on the table.
- Whistling indoors (all your money will escape the house)
- Shaking hands or giving a gift to someone through a doorway
- Brushing somebody’s feet with a broom
These are just the superstitions that I’m aware of…I’d be willing to be a shiny heads-up penny, though, that there are dozens more that I’m just not privy to yet. Most of these things are easy enough for me to avoid—I don’t often walk around with buckets of any kind, especially not empty ones and I rarely sweep in the presence of anybody else, so there are no feet to brush except my own. The others sometimes take a little remembering—during training one of my cluster-mates often started whistling inside without thinking about it. He was always quickly admonished by our language instructor, and I suppose that made a lasting impression on me. I almost never find myself whistling inside these days.
So now with this new list of superstitions to add to my already brimming bag of things not to do, I really have to watch out, lest I accidently bring myself all kinds of bad luck. My friends (most of whom have much more sense than I do) laugh and whistle inside just to spite me. They graciously offer to sit at the corner of a table—even if I have no desire to get married for at least seven or eight years, if ever, I’d still like to keep my options open. And although I’m still trying to work out how to combine my native superstitions with the new ones of this place I now call home, and as much as my American friends tease me for my superstitious paranoia, I’ve noticed that during the last three weeks, as the rain pours relentlessly from the sky, we all keep our umbrellas shut inside. Turns out I’m not the only one with a few superstitious tendencies.
