Friday the 13th BAD LUCK DAY
Friday the 13th Scholz and Zeno and Wallace
Friday the 13th, that date whose superstitious reputation is both absurd and compulsively compelling (or so I tell myself as I watch a snowstorm, small and unheroic but sufficient to make every pedestrian regret having emerged), began, as is typical, with the residue of a fractured sleep—the kind where the mind doesn’t quite leave the dream, doesn’t quite register the morning, and yet somehow is simultaneously alert to every minor failing of the world outside. The air was colder than yesterday, which was mild, reminding me that temperature can itself be a petty adversary, and the snow—enough to inconvenience but not enough to glorify—settled over the city like a layer of passive-aggressive criticism.
I left the house around ten, intending to attend a medical appointment, which, like minor wars or particularly tedious court cases, is best approached with low expectations, and I was not disappointed: the elevator, a machine whose existence I had assumed as fundamental to civilized life, was broken. This is always interesting: the moment a system fails, civilization itself seems to wink out; the abstraction of progress vanishes in favor of the immediate, irritating friction of stairs and awkward eye contact with strangers who, like you, are considering whether to complain or to keep quiet. A stranger helped me descend—small kindness, and yet also a reminder that misfortune often comes laced with minor, accidental grace.
Later I learned there was a working elevator elsewhere in the building, invisible because of absent signage—a fact that might serve as a metaphor for institutions more broadly, or might simply annoy the reader; the solution exists, but never where you are told to look, and often not where you expect.
Then I discovered, in what was arguably my own most egregious error of the day, that my transport was booked for eleven p.m., not a.m.—a difference of twelve hours, which in practical terms can feel like twelve years if one has a fragile sense of temporal coordination. This I learned only after a period of waiting, during which I borrowed a telephone from a woman seated beside a young man in a wheelchair (and one notes the subtle social hierarchies in waiting rooms: who is allowed to occupy space, who offers space, who tolerates intrusion). The young man, a lawyer, spoke matter-of-factly of having suffered a stroke brought on by overwork. The story was delivered with the flatness of an ordinary weather report, yet it contained its own quiet tragedy: ambition exerted like physical force, until the body, overstrained, breaks. One could imagine the late nights, the towering stacks of papers, the adrenaline, and the eventual snap. I offered my card; transport was rearranged (12:30, weather-adjusted to 12:40), just barely avoiding the catastrophe of a misapplied fare.
And so the day progressed as a concatenation of small disasters and minor mercies—the broken elevator, the snow, the booking mistake, mitigated by borrowed devices, polite strangers, and fortuitous timing—forming, if one wanted to be generous, the kind of luck people only mention after misfortune: the wrist rather than the back, the inconvenience rather than catastrophe.
Late at night, Richard had returned my call. He sounded spent. His mother had recently fallen and lain on the floor for hours before being discovered—a tragic and horrifyingly ordinary human misfortune. He warmed to my suggestion of a Life Alert device, an action simultaneously practical and morally resonant. Richard and I, never quite allied, exist in a peculiar mutual recognition (which is itself an interesting phenomenon: the battlefield of chums rarely resolves neatly). There is a sense in which decency can act independently of affection, a stubbornness of morality that insists on small gestures despite larger relational indifference.
Looking back, the day’s misfortunes seemed modest. Yet threaded through them were the faint but undeniable evidence of human care: the arm on the staircase, the borrowed telephone, the conversation with a broken-yet-dignified young lawyer, Richard’s concern. Friday the 13th, then, was neither unlucky nor particularly remarkable—merely human, and human in the way that makes small accidents and small kindnesses inseparable from one another. And in that, perhaps, lies a kind of insight that is as subtle as it is necessary.
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