Superstition

I am not superstitious. I walk under ladders, I pet black cats, I sneer at broken mirrors… I am not setting foot outside of my house today.

It has to do with my ship leaving port to go screw around off the north coast of Russia, which was the Soviet Union at the time. I don’t know what we were going to be doing; I was an electrician, and they didn’t tell me those things. They told me how fast to make the boat go, and when we were diving. The usually didn’t tell me when it was time to panic, as that was usually self evident.

We left New London on Friday the 13th of some month. I think it was February, and it was probably 1960 or so. We never reached the coast of Russia, because we hit several storms that beat the crap out of us and forced us to return for repairs. There was, at one point, some small question as whether or not we would even be able to make it back. To a man, we blamed it on the date of our departure.