Every morning, I take my 93-year-old mother for a walk. We almost always walk along Montague House that has a sidewalk beside a metered parking lot. The sidewalk used to be wide enough for us to walk side-by-side, but now that she uses a rollator, it’s a little too narrow. We sometimes walk single file, when there are parked cars. But, on a Saturday in the summer, the parking lot was empty.
In any case, this morning I stepped into the empty parking lot and walked along the curb. As we passed on either side of the parking meters, my mom said, “Bread and butter.”
I, of course, immediately replied, “Bread and butter!”
I remembered how we did this when I was a child and I asked her whether she could remember how she’d learned it. But she couldn’t — I assume it was from her childhood as well. So I looked online for the answer.
At first I found nothing, in part because Internet search sucks now and also because bread-and-butter is a ubiquitous phrase with many practical and idiomatic meanings. But it turns out there is a Wikipedia page for Bread and butter (superstition). What would we do without Wikipedia?
Most of the page is drawn from a 1923 article in the American Journal of Folklore, Signs and Superstitions Collected from American College Girls that claims it wards off bad luck (or prevents a quarrel). Interestingly, it is also the specific charm for when two people go to dry their hands on the same towel. Who knew?
