Snow shovels and voodoo

I like to think I'm not superstitious. But I am.

Just like you.

My childhood Sunday school teacher, Miss Cynthia, and others tried their best to convince me that young boys armed with the shield of faith should shun superstitions. But I was a backslider from the start. I wouldn't walk under ladders. I tried to avoid 13 of anything. I knocked on wood. If I spilled salt, I tasted it to see if it might be sugar.

If someone you trust tells you the only way to get rid of warts is to chew tobacco and spit on the wart and turn around three times next to a spiderweb, then you tend to believe that particular cure is, in fact, a medical fact. Charlie told me that. I trusted him. He had warts. Unfortunately for him, he was too young to chew tobacco. We were 6 or 7 years old at the time.

"Someday," we solemnly pledged. "Someday we're gonna get rid of those warts."

Then we grew up.

No longer did we have to believe in childish superstitions.

Lo and behold, a couple of years ago a small growth appeared on my right hand. After a few weeks, I was pretty sure it was a ... you know.

I thought of Charlie and wondered what chewing tobacco tastes like.

Like any modern man, I hightailed it to my doctor's office. He looked at my hand and said, "I can take care of that."

When he came back into the examining room, he was pulling a cart with a pressurized cylinder of what turned out to be liquid nitrogen.

In case you don't have any liquid nitrogen on the shelf under your kitchen sink, this is what I know about it: It is cold. It is so cold, in fact, that it instantly freezes anything it touches. Including warts.

So my doctor, who has a medical degree and everything, was proposing that he spread a little frostbite on my hand, which would make my wart shrivel up and peel off, bit by bit.

(Sorry, Cherrio crunchers. I didn't mean to spoil the most important meal of the day.)

I started to suggest Charlie's tobacco cure to the doctor, but before I knew what was happening he was dripping liquid nitrogen on my hand.

"This won't hurt," he said matter-of-factly. "It freezes the nerves, too."

Oh, great. And what happens when my hand thaws? OK. It didn't hurt that much. And the wart is gone.

But what am I going to do about the superstition that sleeping in the light of a full moon will make you crazy? You do know the moon is full, don't you?

And what about the water diviner who came to the farm on Killough Valley in the Ozark hills over yonder back in the 1950s and pointed to the spot where we should drill a deep well? Nearly 200 feet down, sure enough, we hit water. We always suspected, however, that you could drill 200 feet down just about anywhere in the valley and hit something wet. Or is divining water genuine voodoo? I sure thought so when I saw the forked peach branch twist in the diviner's gnarly hands.

Thanks to science -- and realizing my mother's back is still intact even after I stepped on all those cracks in sidewalks all over the world -- I don't have many good superstitions left.

However, if you come to my house, you will see leaning against the wall of my ever-so-neat garage an unused snow shovel.

Whenever I leave the shovel in the garden shed when cold weather arrives, we get snow. But if I remember to get the shovel and put it in the garage as winter approaches, I never have to use it. That's based on nearly 10 years of personal observation, which, I assure you, is a highly scientific process.

Of course, by telling you about the shovel, I've probably jinxed the whole thing. If you're the least bit superstitious, prepare for a blizzard.

Say, would you like to see the scar on my hand?

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.