Sally Breslin: My Life

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Monday, May 20, 2024

THERE ARE CERTAIN SUPERSTITIONS I STILL BELIEVE

I like to think I’m not a superstitious person, but I guess the truth is, I really am.

There are some superstitions that don’t bother me, such as Friday the 13th. If it truly were a day of bad luck, then everyone on the planet would have a crummy day, which seems highly unlikely to me. In fact, I know a lot of people who consider 13 to be their lucky number. My late husband was one of them.

I’ve also never been concerned about walking under a ladder – unless there’s a guy perched on top of it and he’s holding a bucket of paint. Picturing him losing his balance and dousing me with a heavy coating of “sunshine yellow” usually is enough to make me walk around a ladder.

And I can remember back when I was in grammar school and one of the kids told me about, “if you step on a crack, it will break your mother’s back.” I was horrified. As I walked home from school that day, I looked down at every crack on the sidewalk, and was very careful not to step on any. Alas, my big foot finally landed on a crack and I burst out crying, thinking I’d arrive home to find my mother lying immobile and in agony on the floor, all because I’d stepped on a crack. Fortunately, my mom was just fine, so that immediately dispelled that superstition.

But there are three superstitions that always have made me feel ill at ease.

First, there’s the superstition that if a black cat crosses your path, you’ll have bad luck. Well, years ago, one of my neighbors adopted a black cat and it crossed my path nearly every time I left the house...and my luck that year was pretty rotten. It got to the point where whenever I saw that darned cat coming toward me, I’d either run (or drive) in the other direction to avoid having it walk directly in front of me.

“If the cat has even a few white hairs on it, then it’s not considered a true black cat and doesn’t cause bad luck,” one of my friends informed me. “Have you ever checked under its chin or on its chest? If it has any white hairs, that’s where they’ll most likely be.”

So I sat out on my front steps one day and lured the cat over to me by waving some chicken at it. Then, as the cat came over to take the bait, I held the piece of chicken up high so I could get a good look at the cat's chin and chest. I saw three distinct white hairs standing out against the black and breathed a sigh of relief. The cat wasn’t a genuine black cat after all, so I was safe! I never avoided the animal again after that, even though I did realize there was the remote possibility those three white hairs might have fallen out at some point and transformed him into an official pure-black, bad-luck cat.

There also was the superstition about spilled salt causing bad luck. But in that instance, the bad luck supposedly could be prevented if you immediately threw a pinch of the salt over your left shoulder to, according to legend, blind the invisible devil lurking behind you and waiting to pounce.

Well, over the years, I probably spilled enough salt to fill a shaker the size of a trash barrel. And every time I spilled it, I’d toss a pinch of it over not just the left, but both of my shoulders, just to be doubly safe. I mean, how could I be sure which side of my back the invisible devil might be lurking?

The problem was, I once spilled the salt in a restaurant and immediately flung a pinch of it over both shoulders...at the precise moment the waitress was right behind my chair and leaning forward to refill my water. I'm lucky I wasn't sued.

But the superstition that actually has brought me ongoing bad luck and has been the bane of my existence for years is the one with the longest bad-luck curse…breaking a mirror. It's a well-known fact that any poor sap who has the misfortune of breaking a mirror is doomed to face seven long years of torture.

The whole mirror superstition is based on the ancient belief that your reflection in the mirror actually is your captured soul. Break the mirror and basically, you also wreck your soul, which, according to ancient beliefs, then takes seven years to renew itself. Thus, seven years of bad luck follow…until your poor, damaged soul becomes whole again.

I’ll never forget the first time I broke a mirror. I was just entering high school and had signed up for a co-ed judo class at the YMCA. As I was rushing to get ready for the class one evening, I quickly grabbed my small mirror from my purse so I could check my hair. The next thing I knew, the mirror was lying on the floor and I was picking up the pieces.

During the class that night, the judo instructor taught us the basic moves of throwing and falling. Seeing there were only three females in the class, I was paired up with a guy, a big kid who was about six feet tall and 190 lbs. When it came to the "throwing" part of the class, he flung me so hard, I went airborne…and landed with all of my weight on my right big toe. I think people out on the street heard it crack. When I looked down at my bare foot, there was no doubt my toe was broken...because the bone was sticking straight up out of it.

I learned the true definition of the word “humiliation” that night when I had to sit, still wearing my judo outfit, in the emergency room at Sacred Heart Hospital. Even worse, the doctor turned out to be a comedian.

“So, Kung Fu!” he greeted me, shaking his head and chuckling. “How did you break your toe?”

I wasn’t amused.

Thanks to the broken mirror, my luck got only worse after that...the inevitable seven years of torture. For one thing, I had to learn how to manipulate crutches on the 10,000 stairs in my high school because nothing was handicapped accessible back then. Also, while I still was recovering, I happened to witness a crime and was subpoenaed to testify in court…on the day of my mid-term exams.

Oh, and the guy who invited me to his prom stood me up.

I hadn't known back then there actually were antidotes to remove the seven-year curse, such as burying the broken pieces of the mirror outside beneath a full moon, or pulverizing the pieces into a powder so they never could reflect anything again. If I had, then maybe I wouldn’t have needed two more surgeries on my toe over the next four years, which forced me to hobble around on crutches once again and inevitably caused me to lose my first full-time job as a Girl Friday, an errand “runner” in a big office building. Or maybe I never would have found out that my boyfriend of two years had been cheating on me for 23 months (on second thought, maybe finding that out wasn’t such bad luck after all).

Anyway, even to this day, I still feel my pulse quicken whenever I'm holding a mirror, for fear I'll drop it. I'd rather climb up onto the bathroom sink and look into the mirror on the wall when I need to see something close-up. At least I can't drop that mirror.

But considering how hideous my reflection has looked lately, I truly believe it’s only a matter of time before I end up cracking it.

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Tuesday, May 14, 2024

DO-IT-YOURSELF ELECTROLYSIS TURNED OUT TO BE A PRETTY HAIRY EXPERIENCE

ANNOUNCEMENT: Before I get into this week’s column, I just want to let you know I finally have expanded my free sci-fi novella, “Inside the Blue Cube,” into a full-length novel! It has gone from 32,000 words to 122,000. So whether you’ve already read the original novella and are curious to know what happened after it ended, or you’ve never downloaded any of it before and want to read the complete novel for the first time, just click on the link at the bottom of this page to read the novel (in e-book form) FREE! There is no catch – I just want people to read what I write and hopefully, enjoy it! It’s also my first attempt at writing science fiction, so if nothing else, it might be good for a laugh (intentionally or otherwise!).

Now, on to the subject of home electrolysis!

You’d think that by now, I’d be old enough to realize that when I try to cut corners, I usually end up losing money. Such was the case with a catalog order I placed several months ago.

The item was a do-it-yourself electrolysis kit. When I first saw the ad for it, it sounded like a dream come true. This kit wasn’t like the others I had seen, where you have to kill one hair at a time by jabbing the roots with an electric needle and holding it there for hours before the hair finally surrenders and drops dead.

No, this state-of-the-art kit had self-adhering pads that you just stick onto your skin and kill hundreds of unwanted hairs all in one shot. And the ad really emphasized the word “kill.” Stubborn hair would be gone forever, it promised, gone to that giant hairball in the sky, never to return again.

Needless to say, I was excited. If there's one thing I've learned about growing older, it's that you begin to lose hair where you want to keep it, and start growing it where you don't want to see it - like your chin and upper lip. Could I, I wondered, really throw away my tweezers, my Nair, my wax strips and my razors? Could I really have forever-smooth skin and finally be rid of those three stubborn black hairs on my chin - the ones that are the consistency of wire and defy all attempts to pluck them with anything weaker than vise-grips?

There was only one way to find out. I wrote out a check for $102.99 and sent for the machine.

Unfortunately, the item was back-ordered and took nearly a month to arrive. When it did, I immediately tore open the box and examined the contraption. It looked like a torture device.

Coming out of the little white plastic machine were three wires - one that snapped onto the self-adhering hair-removal pad, another that snapped onto the “ground” pad (the pad that prevents you from getting an electrical jolt that will make all of the body hair that’s NOT under the pad stand up straight on end) and a third one that connected to the conductor pad.

Eager to get started, I hooked up the pads, then slapped one onto my chin and the other two onto my arm. I cranked up the machine to “super kill.”.

“If you have any dental fillings, you might experience a slight metallic taste in your mouth during the treatment,” the instruction booklet stated.

Metallic was an understatement. A few seconds into the treatment, I felt as if I had been chewing on a ball of aluminum foil.

“And you might experience a slight tingling sensation,” the booklet also added.

“Slight tingling” turned out be the equivalent of being attacked by a swarm of killer bees. Still, I figured the torture would be short-lived and worth every minute if it saved me from ever having to shave or pluck again.

When I finished one section of my chin, I moved the pads to another section. In my eagerness, I did something unthinkable. I yanked one of the wires too hard and tore it, along with the snap, right out of the ground pad.

Panicking, I grabbed some duct tape and taped the snap back onto the pad. Then I tried it. I swear my eyes flashed “TILT” when I turned on the machine, the jolt was so shocking. Then, the machine went dead. Frustrated, I tore off the pads and tossed them back into the box. Leave it to me, I thought, silently cursing myself. In only 10 minutes, I had managed to destroy a $103 machine.

I desperately scanned the warranty information in the booklet and happened to notice an order blank for a set of replacement pads…for $36. Muttering under my breath, I wrote out another check. I figured I had no choice. I mean, I needed those darned pads or the machine would be useless. Still, I thought $36 was a pretty high price to pay for my carelessness.

A month passed, with no sign of the pads. I called the company in New York. The customer-service lady told me my order was at the warehouse in California and would be shipped soon. Another month passed. Again, I was told the order was in California.

“How much longer will it take?” I protested. “I desperately need those pads! Do you want me to end up looking like a gorilla?"

“I’ll have someone call you about it tomorrow,” she answered mechanically, not sounding the least bit sympathetic.

Had I been holding my breath waiting for the call, I’d have been as blue as a Smurf...and most likely dead. Once again, I called the company.

“We’re sorry,” the woman who answered said. “The company has changed hands and we have no idea what happened to the California orders. No one is even answering the phones out there anymore. I suggest you put a stop-payment on your check.”

“Are you trying to tell me I’m never going to get the pads?” I asked.

“It doesn’t look that way,” she said.

I never did receive them, never was able to use the machine again, and never was able to get a refund...because a warranty isn't any good if there's no one around to honor it.

Am I upset that I wasted a total of $139 on a product I used for only 10 minutes? No, of course not, not at all.

Now if you will excuse me, I’m going to go spend every remaining minute of my life tracking down the former owner of the company so I can replace that pad I broke. Then I'm going to turn my electrolysis machine up to "super kill" and duct-tape the wires to his...

Never mind.

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Tuesday, May 7, 2024

HOW MANY OF YOU REMEMBER THE "BE KIND, REWIND" ERA?

I was looking at my combination VCR/DVD player the other day and thought I probably should disconnect it and retire it to the corner of the basement where all of my other old has-been stuff goes to die.

Currently stacked in that corner are two boom-boxes, three word-processors, a black-and-white portable TV with a pull-up antenna, two AM radios, an old video camera that weighs about 25 lbs., a manual treadmill and an 8mm movie projector, among other things. Most of them should have been given their last rites and a decent burial ages ago.

Anyway, as I stared at my trusty old VCR/DVD player, my thoughts drifted back to the time when VCRs first were widely introduced to the public for home use, and how excited I'd been.

"You mean to tell me," I asked my husband, "if we had a VCR, I could record my favorite singers or movie stars and watch them any time I want?"

"Sure," he said. "You could even run the recordings in slow motion or freeze the tape whenever there's a good close-up."

When he saw my eyes widen at the thought of all of the TV hunks I could freeze, he quickly added, "Forget it. VCRs are way too expensive."

I would have tried to tempt him by telling him he could record the Super Bowl or the World Series and replay every exciting moment, but my late husband probably was one of the few men on earth who would have preferred to be doused with a bucket of syrup and staked naked to an anthill than watch sports.

So I had to try a different approach.

"You know how some TV shows feature all of those scantily clad models running around on the beach or even playing volleyball?” I asked him. “Can you imagine how funny they'd look in slow motion bouncing up and down, up and down...over and over again?"

The next day, we were at Montgomery Ward, buying a VCR. It cost $799. We also bought a blank tape for $15.98.

I soon became convinced that learning how to program a VCR was one of the major causes of divorce back in those days. I still can remember reading the instructions out loud to my husband as he tried to hook up that first VCR to our TV, and how, when nothing worked, he accused me of skipping over some important major paragraphs during my reading. As it turned out, he'd forgotten to plug it in.

But even as time went on and VCRs improved, it still took about three weeks to learn how to set up one correctly – especially if you wanted it to record a program. I think they actually held night-school courses to teach people how to program the machine to record their favorite shows.

Back then it required manually entering the recording time, day, date, station number and length of the recording. But the most important thing you had to learn how to do back in those days to make sure your recording would be successful was...pray.

Most of the time, I ended up accidentally programming the hour as AM instead of PM, and then would wonder why the VCR had taped an infomercial for vacuum cleaners instead of the Doobie Brothers in concert. And heaven forbid if there was a brief power outage or a blip in the flow of electricity, because that would set the clock on the VCR back to a constant, flashing 12:00, making any recording settings null and void.

But VCRs were a necessity if we wanted to watch all of the latest movie releases in the comfort of our own home and make good use of our memberships at the three local VCR-rental stores within a five-mile radius of our house.

Nothing was better than Wednesday Bargain Day when movies could be rented for only 99 cents each instead of the usual $2.50. That’s when I would come home with about five of them, each one with a “Be Kind, Rewind!” reminder printed on the label…because nothing was worse than sitting down with a bowl of popcorn and turning on the movie, only to see the closing credits.

Oh wait…I take that back. Nothing was worse than rewinding the movie on the high speed (which still took forever) and hearing a “snap” in the middle of it, then also hearing the tape making a “whap, whap” sound…especially after you’d been on the waiting list for the previous two months to rent one of the "new releases."

Anyway, Wednesday Bargain Day was what gave my husband the brilliant idea of buying a second VCR and a couple cables to hook it to the other machine, so we could make copies of the bargain videos. Then we could watch them at our leisure instead of sitting in front of the TV for 10 hours and struggling to stay awake to watch all of them in one shot before they were due back the next day.

Sure, there eventually were warnings about copying movies being a criminal offense and how you could rot in jail for it or be fined thousands of dollars just for recording something like “Howard the Duck.” But we weren’t going to try to sell the copies we made, we just were going to watch them and then erase them. And we used the same form of reasoning that little kids did...“But everyone else is doing it, Mom!”

I still have a big plastic tub of those videotapes in the basement, because we never got around to watching most of them. The actual tapes are so old and brittle now, they crumble when touched, and most of the movies on them have been shown on regular TV about 150 times each by now.

Eventually, when VCRs became less of a novelty and the prices dramatically dropped, we learned it was cheaper to keep buying new machines rather than repairing the old ones. But if an old one still was working, we’d retire it to the bedroom and hook up the new one in the living room.

That's when I found a unique use for one of the old VCRs in the bedroom. It was the type of machine that when you pushed the "eject" button, a platform popped up out of the top and you then were supposed to slide the videotape into it and lower it back into the machine.

Well, one time when my husband and I were trying this new fad-diet (zero carbs) and carefully were watching each other to make sure neither one of us would cave in and cheat, I discovered the VCR in the bedroom was the perfect place to hide Hershey bars…because they were flat and could neatly be stacked on that pop-up platform meant for the tape.

So every night after dinner, I'd sneak into the bedroom, push the eject button on the VCR, and voila! Up would pop my secret stash.

It worked fine until I forgot to shut off the machine one night and the heat melted the chocolate.

Eventually, VCRs became obsolete and DVD players became all the rage.

Sure, DVDs were worlds better and more convenient, especially since no hours of rewinding were involved. I mean, you could click back to a previous scene in only a second. And storing the DVDs was a breeze because they took up hardly any space. Also, the picture always was sharp, unlike on the VCR tapes where the tracking constantly had to be adjusted to get rid of fuzzy lines, ripples or static.

Still, I definitely wasn’t a big fan at first.

That’s because DVDs are round…and Hershey bars are rectangular.

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