-= My True Story =-
I’m not overly superstitious, but years ago in Hawaii, I had a spate of bad luck. The horrible sunburn I got was no mystery; neither was the horrible stomach flu; however, every time I went to Honolulu in a friend’s car, the damn thing broke down. It got so bad that I refused to go by car and I resolved to go by bus. It broke down and I had to wait three hours for a new bus to be dispatched. Then one day, I got off the bus at a place called “Valley of the Temple” to buy a calculator for a math course I was taking. The next four buses failed to show and then a couple of big Polynesians who had been drinking walk by and they beat me to a pulp. I eventually was able to flee and they were close behind. I started knocking on doors randomly but couldn’t stay long enough to wait for an answer. Finally, I knocked on a door and immediately a huge Tongan opened the door. He grabbed me and said, “Who did this to you?” All I could do was point and he rushed outside.
The bad guys took one look at him and suddenly remembered they had to be somewhere else. This fellow who helped me—his family was Seventh Day Adventists—and he helped treat my wounds and then, with his family, drove me 30 miles to a 24-hour clinic next to my University. I’ll never forget what he did for me. I had to wear a waterproof nylon cast and was in such pain for a couple of weeks that I was popping Percodan like M&Ms! After two weeks, I went for a dive with my dive class and bought a new facemask and snorkel (my old ones being stolen by the muggers). Halfway out to the dive site, the mask began leaking and I came this close to drowning. Only by sheer will did I manage to make it back to the dive site. The instructor’s son, not realizing what the problem was, tried his best to make me stop using my regulator and kept pulling it out of my mouth. Later, when he learned what the situation was, he apologized, but he’d pretty much done all he could to kill me.
It was one thing after another. Then I left the island and headed back home. But the bad luck continued. Then I became really superstitious. I began to rid myself of everything I’d gotten in Hawaii. I gave away shirts and souvenirs and then...everything went back to normal. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care.
Then a few years later, I was talking to a friend of mine, a Navy Captain who had been assigned to head up all three Navy hospitals in Hawaii. I told him my experience expecting him to laugh it off. Instead, he asked, “Was one of the things you threw away a piece of lava?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was from the big island and carved into the form of Madam Pele, a local goddess.”
He nodded and said, “Well, that was probably it.” He went on to explain that it wasn’t that it was carved in the form of a goddess that was the problem. It was the lava itself. In fact, he said, he had visited the visitor’s center on the island and had seen a room with letters posted by people who had taken lava from the big island and had been smitten with horrible luck. Eventually, they sent the lava back with a letter apologizing for taking it. A friend had given me the lava form as a welcoming gift to Oahu. I explained to my Navy friend that I hadn’t returned the lava, but had just thrown it away. He shrugged and said, “Whatever works.”
“Tom,” I said. “You’re pretty level headed. Do you believe all this ‘curse’ business?”
“No,” he replied. “But then, I wouldn’t take any lava away from the island, and if I had a piece, I’d probably get rid of it.” He said the visitor’s center gets hundreds of letters with pieces of lava enclosed. They posted the letters and rotated them frequently.
“But you said you weren’t superstitious,” I said.
“Yep,” he replied, leaning back in his chair. “But why take the chance?”

