The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
A mentor and friend from the beginning of my legal career here in Panama City once observed that this place is beautiful so long as you're standing on the beach looking south. He had a point; the windshield tour of Bay County has always been unlovely, the cumulative detritus of bad or nonexistent urban planning spread across a steamy, sandy pine barren.
I've fallen into proving his point here in this blog by only posting photos looking south across the bay from 407. So this morning I snapped a shot looking northeast, inland toward the Cove.
Then again, the wag reading this might observe that the photo was taken in the dim light of dusk, and the view might not fare so well in the bright afternoon. True enough.
BP was 115/84, and my spirits were raised yesterday by a book I received for Father's Day from Issac and Olivia, a Father's Day card from our "kids" in Corning, and a nice note from Jim containing an apology for missing the holiday (there's no such thing in Turkey. Go figure) along with some nice thoughts. The day wasn't a bust after all.
On my morning run, trudging up and down the hills in the Cove at six in the morning, I noticed a copper flash on the pavement over near Bonita Avenue, and looked down to see a somewhat mangled penny.
Should I pick it up? In its weathered condition, I had trouble discerning the most important fact required to answer that question: was it face up?
You see, despite years of education and training in the lawyer's arts of logical and analytical reasoning, I'm still fairly superstitious. And if Abe's not looking back at me in profile, that coin is bad juju, to be stepped around like a coiled snake. But the coin was in fact face-up, making it lucky, and so it received a ride in my pocket back to the condo.
Most fighter pilots I know carry around a little more belief in magic and bad omens than most, perhaps because our rate of exiting the gene pool early is slightly higher than that of the population at large. I remember my old acquaintance Rick, callsign "the Fonz" after his obsessive habit of whipping out a comb and flipping an overgrown lock of hair over his bald spot after doffing his helmet but before descending the ladder. Walking to the officer's club on our way to go drinking, still quite sober, I watched him hopscotch across the sidewalk, assiduously avoiding stepping on a crack because, well, he didn't want to break his mother's back. Of course.
Thankfully no one seems to have noticed that I do the same thing, although my mother's eight spine surgeries over the years suggest my efforts have not been altogether successful.
The other day, just before we crawled into the Columbia to fly it over to Tallahassee, my buddy Bobo whipped out his phone and suggested we pose for a photo. I almost slapped it out of his hand. "No. No. No. No photos of the plane before we take off. Only after we land. Bad luck."
Bo's a 2,000-plus hour jet pilot. He should know that.
Then Peg took his advice that bananas would somehow cure my heartburn and help wean me off Prilosec after all these years. I couldn't eat them all in a day, and the need to get them over here to Panama City as we left Wyldswood led to a seafarer's superstition creeping into my aviator brain. One never carries bananas on a boat, lest the vessel become caught in a squall and go down with all hands aboard. Really, it's a thing.
But does this curse apply to airplanes? I pondered this as I dutifully tossed what was left of the bunch into the cargo hold for the flight here, knowing they'd just rot at Wyldswood. There was some trepidation as I broke ground, knowing the cursed fruit sat only a few feet behind me, summoning the forces of darkness that could stop the propeller from spinning or conjure a thunderstorm in my path.
It seems, however, that nautical superstition has no application in the flying world. The flight proceeded without incident, and I'm here to write this today.
Why all this magical thinking? I'd tell you that it's all for fun, this rubric of avoiding sidewalk cracks and facedown pennies and bananas in the cargo hold, but the fact is I get a real sense of dissonance and doom when I feel my foot come down on a sidewalk crack, and truly won't pick up a penny if the Lincoln Memorial is flashing back up at me. I also talk to the geese as if they understand me, and to household appliances when they act up. But I'm not crazy--neither the geese nor the refrigerator ever talk back. But in some ways I guess I live--maybe a lot of us live--in a world a Greek or a Druid would recognize, full of sentience and demon filled, where even our most trivial decisions about where to step or what to carry with us (are you wearing a St. Christopher's as you read this? Welcome to the tribe) portend consequences that might seem unrelated but for the skein of connections that hold the universe together.
It's quantum entanglement for those of us who got a B in high school physics, the notion that manipulating a particle here on my desk might affect the properties of another particle a thousand light years away. The experienced universe is interconnected in ways we can't fathom.
So maybe my crack avoiding, penny evaluating, photo-less aircraft boarding are all part of a religion, a liturgy developed as an outward manifestation of my recognition that there's a hell of a lot out there I don't understand, and that ignorance means I snicker at superstition at my peril. All of these little rituals are a reminder of how little I know, an act of humility.
Or at least that's how rational me explains these irrational impulses and beliefs. It's just who we are.
A call with a disagreeable lawyer at ten to argue about discovery (his favorite sport, it seems), followed by two investment salesmen who managed to get on my calendar (part of the reason Stacy is now a former employee), multiple witness interviews ahead of a July trial, and a discussion of the application of the Apex doctrine on a call with a client's in-house counsel. A busy day, which helps to distract from the fact that I haven't seen P in going on two weeks, or Tara for nearly a month now. Growing weary of all this solitude, talking to my espresso machine about all the great times we've had together.
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