A little late here, but Happy friggin' New Year. Good riddance to the old one. 2007? The year of the death, burial, and rebirth of love. The year of pain and the end of one life as I knew it. The year of surprise. If I would really look at the whole year as a whole and count all the good things against the bad ones, I'm not really sure it would even out. For the better part of this year, I have made very fond memories camping in both freezing temperatures and in A/C enhanced summer heat, going to numerous VW shows, and growth enhancing time spent with my children, the trip to Florida and Disney World, and new friends made along the way. But if I was to put the good memories and what I would call the "super incident" on a set of scales, the "super incident" would just about tip the scales so hard, the good memories would go flying toward the castle wall like a flaming petard from a catapult. I call 2007 "The year of lucky number 13" for me.
I have always given the number 13 the benefit of the doubt. It seemed to me that it had been getting a bad rap all these years. Being associated with bad luck, omens, demons, and whatever else scared, small-minded humans can dream up. It can't help that it is the number between the perfect 12 and ordinary 14. It didn't choose to be an unlucky number. I pick it when I play the lottery. I secretly leap for joy when I end up being the 13th person in line. A baker's dozen doesn't sound so bad to me...you get to eat one and leave the honest dozen behind. At 13, you are no longer just a child, you are now a teenager. There were 13 people sitting at the table at the Last Supper (Judas Iscariot is considered the 13th, though...oops). King Arthur had 12 knights, bringing the number at the Round Table to 13. There are 13 main constellations in relation to our sun. There were 13 original colonies here in the "New World". The American flag has 13 horizontal stripes. 13 is the atomic number of aluminum, which without, we wouldn't have lovely aluminum siding or Diet Dr. Pepper 12-packs in a convenient fridge pack.
Perhaps the reason 13 has become such a bane in not only our society, but in societies around the globe is fear. Supposedly, the Knights Templar were arrested and executed on Friday the 13th, 1307. Although somewhat inaccurately, it has been highly regarded that this is the reason that Friday the 13th is considered unlucky. In Tarot decks, the 13th card of the Major Arcana is Death, while not always taken literally, it perhaps gave 13 some more credibility in being an unlucky number. Most of this fear of the number 13 originated in the Roman age. Way before that, though, the Egyptians had a superstition of the number 13, although not in a negative light. They believed that there were 12 steps on the ladder to eternal life and to take the 13th step would be going through death and stepping into eternal life.
You think the above stuff just came out of my head? Thank the Good Lord for giving us the internet...great references there, I tell you. But anyway, I'll leave the reasonings behind the superstition to those who really care. I just think that the number itself has no significance, even though there are those who really think that it does. For me, the number 13 has a meaning all it's own. This is where I have my only negative feeling for the number...my marriage to my wife, the mother of my children, ended after 13 years. That's it. I don't believe there are negative connotations associated with a mere number. Just because my marriage ended in it's 13th year, I still can't bring myself to be afraid of or have a superstitious feeling towards it. After all, it's just a number. Maybe I can look at it this way: After 13 years of marriage, a new beginning arises. A new life emerges from the wreckage of the old one. It is the heralding of the age of a new me, a person reborn. I can look at the number in a new light, and still it is not in a negative way.
Goodbye 2007. I hope you have a good retirement. Thanks for all the good memories as well as the bad. I appreciate the way you flipped my life upside down and for filling it full of mistake after mistake. And thanks a lot for making me doubt one of my favorite numbers. You threw in a mustard seed sized bit of doubt, but you know what? I still like 13. I really do. I even have new reasons to like it. Here's to those reasons!
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