It is Friday the 13th. I don’t know if you put much stock in the old tale of woe that comes on this combination of days: there are three of them coming at us in 2012, and this is the first.

There is some squirrely stuff going on, now that I have a chance to look at the wider world again. The pesky Iranians and the covert war and bellicose saber-rattling are a little unsettling, as is the viral video of the Marines doing whatever it was they did in Helmand Province in Afghanistan last year.

There are other things to worry about. This is the sixth day of the week and the 13th of the month. The confluence of both has ominous reputations that date back to Roman times, or beyond. The day is said to portend more misfortune than some credulous minds can bear. Certainly mine.

I prefer to think that the modern association of Friday the Thirteenth as a day of bad luck dates most immediately to Friday, October 13, 1307, when the vile and rapacious King Phillipe IV of France decapitated the leadership and rank and file of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. We know them now by the shorter and more accommodating name of the Knights Templar.

At the time, the Templars were immensely wealthy and powerful, with both military and financial arms. They were known as “the bankers of Europe” because they controlled so much of its wealth, and operated with the charter of the Holy Father in Rome.

It took a perfect storm to bring them down. There was a weak Pope at the time, of French extraction, who was under house-arrest in Avignon, a war King who was broke and deeply in hock to the Templars, and an intricate plot to lure the Grand Master of the Templar Order to a place where he could be forcibly detained.

The scheme used the funeral of Phillippe’s sister-in-law Catherine of Courtenay as the cheese in the trap. Grand Master Jacques de Molay was invited to be a pallbearer. The funeral was in Paris, on the 12th of October.

The King had de Molay arrested the following day, along with virtually the entire leadership of the Templars, who were tortured into confessing to heresy and witchcraft. There ensued seven years of imprisonment, in which de Molay protested his innocence, but in the end, Phillipe had him burned at the stake on the island 18 March 1314.

That is a Monday, by the way, and the day that I associate with a mild headache and reluctance to get out of bed.

None-the-less, it is the Friday coincidence that will have people avoiding things today, but I won’t be one of them. I am going to treat this as an ordinary business day, and very glad to be back at it. Sleep is good. I had some intense dreams that featured rail travel in Australia. I have no idea what they meant. Portents of a journey, perhaps?

I take that under advisement, since the immediate crisis has passed, and now there is a mountain of paperwork to be done.

The show moves on with the living, and I don’t need to tell you how precious the Thanksgiving and Christmas trips up to Michigan were. All the kids got there, and if we did not know we were saying goodbye to Mom and Dad, they both knew that we were there and that we loved them.

If I had not gone for Thanksgiving and Christmas I would have kicked myself for a long time.

As part of the stack of things to be done, I looked at the last pictures I have of Bill and Betty, now freed of their roles in the long decline, and free to be themselves once more.

I now look at these pictures I took- the last ones- of Mom and Dad from the 28th of December 2011 as part of the miracle.

Betty Foley Reddig, 15 June 1924- 03 January 2012

W.E. Reddig, 08 August 1923- 03 January 2012

Amazing. The whole thing is freaking amazing.

Life is precious. We should live it.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra