I Want to Believe

I’m superstitious and always have been. My mother brought me up that way. My dad always had a sardonic attitude about such things. Whenever Mom would get onto the topic of bad luck as it related to broken mirrors, umbrellas being opened indoors or black cats, my father would say nothing, but I always looked for the wry, private smile, and it was invariably there, nearly invisible to everyone but me.

His smile suggested that I should consider my mother’s beliefs ridiculous. But I didn’t. There was something in the way she discussed the supernatural – a confidence maybe – that made me a believer. I didn’t know the word just yet, but looking back now, I think she had “conviction” when it came to superstitions.

Even though the day has been usurped in popular culture by the slasher movie franchise, Friday the 13^th still resonates with me. As I begin my day, I wonder what will go wrong for me. Nothing has in recent memory, but I do vaguely recall a pretty nasty bicycle crash happening on a Friday the 13^th. Or at least that’s how my mind has arranged it for me.

My mother used to refer to herself as a witch sometimes. She only said it occasionally and it’s difficult now to remember the context. It was said in a semi-serious way, usually, I think, when she had known or “seen” something unexplainable. I never thought of it as a joke – not really – and I still believe my mother probably had “powers,” for want of a better word and likely had them since childhood.

In college, my friends and I would do Tarot card readings for each other on occasion. Speaking for myself, I really keyed in on the imagery of the cards. I saw it less as “magic” than an ancient form of psychology, predicated on an individual’s interpretation of the rich symbolism found in the Tarot deck.

As a teacher at Satellite Academy, I may have offended some of my students when, each late October, I would break out the Ouija board for any students who wanted to try it. Invariably, there was a group who said, “I don’t mess with that stuff.”

In that particular situation, it was more about the fun of a circle of kids sitting in dim light, more quiet than I’d ever thought they could be, getting more and more freaked out as they went. They often accused one another of pushing the indicator.

“I’m not! I swear!”

Great fun.

I guess in the end it’s very simple. I’m like Fox Mulder on The X Files. I Want to Believe.

I want to believe in a spirit world. I want to believe in the possibility that there is an “energy” that makes us more than just heavy walking bags of meat, bones and water that eventually expire. I want to believe that when this energy that some call a spirit and others refer to as a soul, has had enough with this body, it may find some simple way of communicating with the loved ones I leave behind. I want to believe I could be a breeze on my son’s cheek on a spring day, a panel of light coming through the window – some little sign that will make him smile, without knowing exactly why.