No. There are so many other things that might, but Friday the 13th is not one of them. This is in part because one of my smartest friends, Carol, told me it’s lunacy spun from some ancient ceremony involving the Knights of the Templar (that I can’t, of course, remember), and she brushed it aside without a look. And it seems to me, with no finger on any pulse, that people are not familiar with these old superstitions today.

They are a relic of another era. I don’t think anyone under 40 knows about sidewalks with cracks, 13 of anything, salt over your shoulder. They are almost like cheap literary contrivances. Something I do have oddly strong feelings about, bordering on the superstitious, is eating any kind of four-legged animal. Also some two-legged, like duck. I will never eat duck. And I haven’t eaten pork or beef (especially veal) for 35 years. This started because I suddenly started to find people carving into these bloody haunches of meat so disturbing. And after walking through the former huge market square in Paris, with hundreds of carcasses hanging side by side, it just repulsed me and I decided to keep my own half-assed vegetarianism. I don’t mention it at dinners. I just eat around the meat. I’m not a pain in the ass, but I cannot eat meat now — even some that looks and smells delicious, like barbecued ribs or prosciutto — without feeling like I am betraying animals.

So it is almost a superstition. I guess it’s more a personal idiosyncrasy. A principle I won’t break. Oh, one real and old-fashioned superstition I have really kept that is almost like warding off the Evil Eye is knocking wood. But I do that to never take anything good for granted and not to jinx anything by voicing it.

Now that you mention it, I suppose it will. I’m very suggestible, but, luckily, I often don’t keep track of what day it is. Thanks for reminding me.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous line — "The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself" — never seemed as consoling to me as it was meant to be. Having fear to fear, when you think about it, is very, very spooky. I don’t think of myself as being superstitious, and yet, if I should break a mirror, I feel a bit queasy in the pit of my stomach … despite myself. And, for a few minutes, I can be haunted by the fact that I have affronted fate in some shadowy way. But, if I truly had a rational mind, should the idea of fate, tempting it or affronting it, even come up?