Ideas - The Curse of 13 | The Greatest Numbers of All Time

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Has there ever been a number more maligned in western culture than 13? So feared, it's got its own horror-film franchise. So infamously unlucky, a good many of us avoid it en masse. We've just blindly accepted its bad reputation. As part of our series, The Greatest Numbers of All Time, IDEAS explores where our irrational fear and uncomfortable feelings about 13 began. *All five episodes in our number series will be available daily in our feed this week.*Listen to 12 is SublimeGuests in this episode:Stephen Winick is a folk life specialist at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.Barry Markovsky is distinguished professor emeritus of sociology at University of South Carolina. His latest book is Everyday Extraordinary: A Scientist Ponders a Lifetime of Magical, Bizarre, and Paranormal Experiences.Claire Potter is a freelance educational writer and the author of the book Getting the Little Blighters to Eat.Rabbi Heschel Greenberg is the founder and director of the Jewish Discovery Center in Buffalo, New York. He has written many books including Tefillin: Judaism's Crown.

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even taped the debaters there once, so I guess we're world-class now. This is a CBC podcast.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyette. Bad luck when been blowing at my back. And this is Johnny Cash, telling the story of a man born in the soul of misery, nameless and destined for trouble from birth. Got the number 13, tattooed on my name. All because he's been branded with the number 13. When the ink starts to itch, then the black will turn to red. I was born in the soul of misery.

Never had me a name. They just gave me the number when I was young. Has there ever been a number? more maligned in Western culture. Mike! Over here! So feared, it's got its own horror film franchise. I don't you found? I wish it was. I'll order up some body bags.

Well, he picked the right day to Polish. Happy Friday the 13th. So synonymous with the awkward transition from childhood to puberty, it has spawned countless, cringe-inducing coming-of-age story. So infamously unlucky, a good many of us avoid it en masse. Americans alone would prefer to avoid 13 floors and other things associated with that. Despite all of that, today on ideas, we're asking you to put aside any negative feelings you might harbor about the number 13. Producer Donna Dingwall is here to make the case for 13 by including it in our ongoing series.

the greatest numbers of all time. American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, To be great is to be misunderstood. Yes, he was talking about the likes of Pythagoras, Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, also Christ, and not the number 13. But I don't think it's a stretch to say our collective apprehension about this particular integer is mired in a lack of understanding. and maybe a blind acceptance of a cultural norm, one that has no basis in reality.

The thing that often comes to mind for people is they're not being a 13th floor on buildings, for example. That's one of the more obvious consequences of the superstition for sure, as well as very few airlines having 13th rows on their planes. Barry Markovsky is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Southern Carolina, And the author of a book called Everyday Extraordinary, a scientist ponders a lifetime of magical, bizarre, and paranormal experiences. He's researched not only how 13 became a symbol of bad luck, but how the superstition spread and why it persists. That aspect is kind of rational because people don't want to sit in those rows. People avoid those floors on buildings and don't want to have a condo on the 13th floor, for example. people change their travel plans on the 13th of each month.

There is like detectable blip in the flight statistics. And once you have a huge segment of the population, believing something that does affect individual behavior, it's bound to affect collective behavior as well. That's what we see. And not just the rows on planes and the floors on buildings, but local news broadcasts always point out things like that in a sort of joking way. you know, watch out. It's Friday the 13th.

So a pretty active weather day on this Friday the 13th, Ryan. Yeah, really wild weather on Friday the 13th, I guess, fitting. We've had some sunshine today. We had thunderstorms, heavy downpour. That just kind of reinforces the meme, if you will, that there's something special and not in a positive way about this number. Scientifically, that's been proven false, along with the negative connotation around the so-called full moon effect. I had a student who was a police officer, and he was a skeptic about the full moon effect, but he said everybody around him believed that weird things happen on nights when there's a full moon.

That would be great to know, like should we put on extra patrol officers on Friday the 13th? I've heard doctors and nurses say this, too. Yeah, and they are 100% convinced of it. And every time it's been studied carefully and systematically, it's an effect of how we recall things. We have a prominent date, and we tend to find unusual events more memorable on those dates. You know, who remembers bad things that happened on Wednesday to 11th? And yet so ingrained is the idea that even the social scientist had to stop himself from jumping to conclusions on a bad day. I lead hikes every Friday morning.

I happened to lead one on, I think it was February the 13th, which was a Friday. Even though I'm not a believer in superstition, it would have been very easy for me to come to the conclusion that that hike was jinxed somehow. We had somebody who got really faint, which had never happened before. I missed a turn and led people at least a quarter mile in the wrong direction. Someone lost their hiking poles after we had a break and had to go back and get them. We had another person go to make sure that all worked out, okay, and then they got separated from the group and lost.

So it was like one thing after another that almost never happens, all happened on that one day. I started looking back and what else could I interpret in a way consistent with that superstition. And it was so easy to do that. I think that's a really fascinating psychological process. It's called confirmation bias. You tend to look for confirmations of something that you believe in or want to believe in. And it's almost always pretty easy to do, but we don't even realize that we're doing it.

Confirmation bias helps us understand our tendency to blame bad things on the number 13, but it doesn't tell us when we started doing that. Finding anything really definitive about why 13 would have been unlucky is very difficult. My name is Stephen Winnick, and I'm a folk life specialist at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. Folklife specialist is what we call folklorists in the U.S. government. So you must have been busy this year with requests from people like me, because I think there's three Friday the 13th this year. Yes, it was a very busy year. In fact, two of them were right next to each other, of course, and that was a, around the time that we did this article. So yes, Friday the 13th was a common phenomenon this year.

What was the name of the article? The name of the article was on the possible origins of Friday the 13th, meta-foclore, fear, and fun. And the reason for that, that subtitle is that I do fairly regular posts about the idea of meta-folklore, which is folklore about folklore. So stories about the origin of Friday the 13th are often folkloric stories, and Friday the 13th belief is itself an item of folklore. So these stories about the origin of Friday the 13th are often folklore about folklore. That's partly because people in his field are reluctant to name a ground zero for a particular custom. Folclorists typically don't like to talk about origins anymore, and we chide each other for saying that this is the origin of something because you simply can't prove it, just because

the first reference to Friday the 13th belief occurs at a certain time doesn't mean that people didn't believe it for 200 years before that. We're always giving our best estimate. The lack of specificity has in no way stopped the rest of us from speculating about why 13 and Friday the 13th are considered unlucky. When I mentioned to a colleague that I was working on something about the number 13 before I even started talking about superstition, he immediately, said, oh, well, the thing that I've heard is that I think is really intriguing is this idea of the Last Supper and that because there was 13 people there, that this is perhaps a place where superstition around Friday the 13th began. And that's something that you look at in the

piece. Yeah. So I would say that that is a piece of meta-folklore about what the origin of the Friday the 13th belief is. The Last Supper occurred on a Friday. And there were, in theory, 13 people, that would be Jesus and the 12 disciples. But there's no really good evidence that it is the origin of it either. So that's again the problem that we have. And yet dinner parties gone wrong with poor guest choices are a bit of a theme. Other people will give as the origin of the unluckiness of 13, a separate example which comes from Norse mythology, which is that there were 13 guests at a dinner party when Balder was killed. The story goes that 12 invitations went out for a party at Valhalla in honor of Balder, the most beloved of the gods.

But Loki, who you might call the original agent of chaos, crashed the party. Then he arranged for Baldur's brother to shoot his sibling with a deadly mistletoe dart, killing him and plunging the world into darkness. seems like a pretty good reason to cast aspersions on 13. This is completely spurious, as far as I can tell. If you go into any of the sources for Norse mythology, the Eddas, you don't find a story about 13 people at dinner. But this became a pretty common story,

and you found it quoted by authorities like National Geographic in writing about the origin of the belief in Lucky 13, unlucky 13. And so essentially this is a, what I would call a variant of the same story that doesn't involve the Christian religion, but it involves another religion. And what we as folklorists would take from that is that this is probably the same story being passed on, but adapted by people along the way. That's called drawing the bullseye around the arrow. This is no surprise to social scientist Barry Markovsky. There are a number of incidents that you could go back and look at historically that seem to keep reconfirming the number 13 as being unlucky.

April 13th, 1970, Apollo 13, man's fifth lunar mission. And Apollo 13 is another example. Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here. This is Houston, say again, please. That's the one that, uh, Houston, we've had a problem. That's the one that had an explosion on board and they almost didn't make it back. Here is a bulletin from ABC News. The Apollo 13 spacecraft has had a serious power supply malfunction.

I'm certainly not going to be willing to say that C, therefore 13, is unlucky. It's more like believing it's unlucky makes us look for confirming examples of it. In an effort to understand how we got to this point, Stephen Winnock, poured through archives. His research took him all the way back to the 15th century and the emergence of tarot cards, which were initially used for rounds of Renaissance-style bridge. But by the next century, the cards were being used for more mystical purposes. So you start to find essays on the metaphorical meanings of tarot cards by that time in Italian. At some point, you start to get references to, again, in the 16th century, to some forms of divination or of telling tales, telling stories,

telling fortunes, using tarot cards. And within the deck, the 13 card is known as the death card. And this is where 13 often gets misinterpreted. If you get the death card, it doesn't necessarily mean someone will die. It means something will metaphorically die. That is, some phase of your life will end or some process is going to end. and it purports to be a number of change for that reason. This gives us a possible explanation for when 13 came by its reputation,

but what is less clear is how it picked up a day of the week on its nefarious journey. We've established that the traitorous Friday night dinner guest theory doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but there is another very popular explanation that's also rooted, in religion. Yeah, the Knights Templar. The edict that led to the destruction of the Knights Templar, which was an order of knights dedicated to maintaining the kingdom of Jerusalem and essentially the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land. So the edict that led to their destruction was actually passed on Friday, October 13th, 1307. People suggest that this Friday, October 13th, is the origin of the Friday the 13th. What tends to suggest that it's not true is that nobody ever mentions

this as the origin of a belief in Friday the 13th until the 20th century. The second reason is that there really is no reason for almost anyone in the Middle Ages to know that that edict was drawn up on Friday, October the 13th, 1307. I mean, people would have known that the Knights Templar were destroyed, people would have known that trials occurred and all that, but the specific date on which this thing was written down, it was not known until historians started to look into this history. I think the Knights Templar is also attractive because the whole order of Knights Templar is already the subject of a wide variety of theories and beliefs, some of which are crazy conspiracy theories and some of which are other kinds of historical theories about the Holy Grail.

and all kinds of other things. So there's a lot of folklore about the Knights Templar already just because people like that story. The papacy declared these priory knights, these Knights, Templar of limitless power. One person enamored with the story was, in fact, a professional storyteller, author Dan Brown. You might have heard of his book, The Da Vinci Code,

and the movie It Spawned. The Templars were all but exterminated. The date was October 13th, 1307, the Friday. Friday the 13th. Given that Brown sold more than 80 million copies of his book, that it's been translated into 44 languages and that the 2006 movie adaptation was the second highest grossing film that year,

there's little doubt that the Da Vinci Code renewed interest in the Knights Templar. And that is exactly the kind of thing a superstition needs to survive. One of the ways I think about this, imagine any meme or set of beliefs, like a conspiracy theory, is requiring a kind of energy to stay alive. Author and sociology professor, Barry Markovsky. I think of them almost ecologically.

Like, they are in competition with one another. And if they don't have energy fueling them, they die. And that's often the case when the environment. is overcrowded with conspiracy theories. In the case of number 13, it doesn't really have competition in the same way. And it also has the benefit of people who latch on to a new product early on are called early adopters. Well, this is like that product that got in on the market early on that didn't have a lot of good competition. So it just keeps going. If September 11th didn't take the onus away from 13 and put it on 11, I don't think any.

anything will. Well, and I guess if Hollywood is still going to make money off of a franchise, it'll continue to perpetuate, I suppose. And that's a great example of what I mean by infusing a belief with energy. If a new movie comes out, you know, Friday the 13th, part 19 or whatever, that's adding fuel to the belief and it's keeping it alive. The fact that it's become institutionalized in some ways on our airplanes. seating charts and our buildings also adds fuel to the belief.

But Dan Brown doesn't get all the credit or blame here. Folklore Stephen Winnick says another book, published at the turn of the century, called Friday the 13th, also gave steam to the superstition. It was written by a person called Thomas W. Lawson, and it's about stock trading and speculation. But the thing that makes it unlikely, well, there's more than one thing to make it unlikely that that's the origin. of the belief. One of them is that simply if you read the book, everybody in the book already believes that Friday the 13th is unlucky. The people involved have these superstitions because they feel like their whole career is based to a certain extent on luck. But it wouldn't really

make sense to write a book in which all the characters had this belief about Friday the 13th that nobody in the real world really had, right? It would be a very hard thing to set up as a whole fantasy thing about stock traders, it's much more likely that the writer, who was himself a stock trader, had just observed this on the stock market and was writing about a realistic portrayal of stock traders. The novel was huge when it came out, selling more than 60,000 copies in the first month. Following the release, stockbrokers around the world allegedly refused to trade on any Friday the 13th's. Well, Lawson's book shows that 13 was considered unlucky in the United States just after the turn of the century, it even got a silent film adaptation in 1916.

It doesn't shed light on how the myth jumped the pond from Europe to the new world. Folklore Stephen Winnick discovered some clues about when that might have happened. I start to find these references in French literature. The two earliest ones that I found are actually from 1834, and one is an article in the Revue de Paris, in which someone says, It is always these vendredi and these number 13 who port malo. It is always Fridays and the number 13 that bring bad luck. And then in a play called Les Finest of Ribouille, also in 1834, a character says, so I was born on a Friday, December 13th, 1813,

from which comes all my misfortunes. How widely read or known were those particular texts? They were pretty well known. And I think, I mean, nowadays, any French literature from the early part of the 19th century that I'm looking for and find within a couple of days of research are pretty low-hanging fruit for people to digitize and all of that, because I didn't go deep into the stacks to find French literature. The next one that I found in the 1870s, I know was very well known because it was translated into English more than once. And that was a play called Lelia by Octav Gastino. It's about a countess named Lelya, and she complains, Oh, no, bien certainment,

I'll restere not more long time to this balmody. So she says, oh, no, I won't stay much longer at this cursed ball. Also, why is Valentine dancing on a Friday, a fasting day, and the 13th? Oh, these Parisian women, they respect nothing, not even superstitions. And in some of the translations, when she exclaims, oh, it's Friday the 13th, she doesn't just leave it at that. She says, oh, it's Friday the 13th. That's so unlucky. And that suggests to me that an American audience wouldn't understand why she was suddenly mentioning the date, right?

That they have to put into the text that Friday the 13th was unlucky so people would understand what was going on in that scene. And that suggests that Friday the 13th was not a widely known belief in the 1870s yet. In social psychology terms, it's called a legitimation process. Part of it has to do with communication. There has to be some mechanism, some network, some media, through which this information flows. Author Barry Markovsky says it's not uncommon for superstitious ideas to gain currency through oral traditions, such as plays and jokes. He's even compared them to an early kind of meme, which makes sense since memes tend to be funny and also have been known to spread disinformation to the masses.

Oral traditions can be amplified tremendously by social media and by mass media. One of the things that I found, which is quite funny, and I found this in several different newspapers, one of them was a joke, and I'll just read the whole thing because it's short, Champ-Waro in despair resolved to commit suicide. He is about to take his last plunge into the sen when all at once he reflects, today, Friday the 13th, never said he recoiling. It might bring me bad luck. Once it becomes established in, let's say, a communication medium, it can take on a life of its own.

That's a kind of top-down version of legitimation. This was not just in one newspaper, but it was reprinted in a bunch of different newspapers. So there were a fair number of Americans who would have read that and laughed at it. Now, at about the same time, you also get jokes about Friday the 13th, particularly in sports contexts. In the newspapers, they will say, and these aren't the real teams, but the Mets are playing the Giants today. It's Friday the 13th. No doubt that will be bad luck for one of the two teams. That's a joke, of course, because one of the two teams is going to lose.

We know that because that's how sports work. Right. Right. And that seems quintessentially American to be joking about baseball and sports. Yes, yes, true. Well, I'll say that a lot of the references to belief in Friday the 13th, just in general, are not people avowing that they believe that Friday the 13th is unlucky. It's them avowing that other people believe that and making fun of them for it. So there were in the United States several examples of clubs that were. created just to mock superstitions. And they were typically called 13 clubs. And the best known was the 13th of New York, which first met on Friday, January 13th, 1882. And the whole idea of these

clubs was to have formal dinner on a Friday the 13th and to have 13 people there to prove that nothing bad was going to happen on Friday the 13th. So it's immediately sort of poking fun at and challenging this superstitious belief in Friday the 13th. Even if some of us don't completely buy into the superstition, clinicians took the fear of the number 13 seriously enough to give it a name. Triskeidecophobia. While there's no reliable estimate of how many people suffer from it, a 2007 Gallup poll found that 13% of Americans would have a level of discomfort

with staying on a hotel's 13th floor. Among them, horror writer Stephen King. In a 1984 piece about his affliction in the New York Times, King even coined a name for his brethren. He called them Triskees. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight,

there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at straffordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even tape the debaters there once, so I guess we're world class now. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, the show where Canada's top comedians answer Canada's top questions like, Are backyards superior to front yards?

We're covering this topic from front to back and back to front and finding out where the grass is greener. This is perfect for your early summer listening on your front porch, back deck, patio, or in the park. So don't miss this week's episode of the debaters wherever you listen to your podcasts. Maybe in a yard. This episode is part of our series

The Greatest Numbers of All Time. The Fear of 13 is hardly a worldwide phenomenon. In many places, it's just a run-of-the-mill integer. And in some cultures, 13 is actually auspicious. Judaism takes the number 13 and applies it in a very different way and understands it as something very positive. Numbers do suggest ideas, and 13 is a very powerful idea. Rabbi Heschel Greenberg is the founder of the Jewish Discovery Center in Buffalo, New York.

After the Jews worship the golden calf and God is extremely, the angry and Moses pleads with God. God forgives them. And God says to Moses that if you invoke these 13 attributes of mercy in prayer, this will help me to forgive you for your sins. So we have 13 attributes of mercy. Nothing can be more positive than that. But 13 is also used in so many other places. For example, the Talmud tells us that there are 13 methods of interpreting the Torah that were passed down from Mount Sinai Maimonides formulates 13 principles of faith

13 things that a Jew must believe in we of course know that Bar Mitzvah is at the age of 13 Even Bat Mitzvah for a girl Which is at the age of 12 means that She is entering into her 13th year If you take the most important word Perhaps in Hebrew Other than God of course

The word is Echad 1 Hero Israel The Lord is our God the Lord is one. That's the most basic premise of Jewish theology, the belief in one God. If you take that word, Echad, and every letter in Hebrew is a number,

it's one plus eight plus four, it gives you 13. So 13 is a very positive number. In indigenous cultures, the 13 moon teachings impart sacred lessons about following the lunar cycle to live in harmony with nature. And in popular culture,

you couldn't find a patron Saint with more clout than Taylor Swift, whose love of 13 is legendary. On the 13th, I turned 13 on Friday the 13th. My first album went gold in 13 weeks. Also, thanks. My first song that ever went number one, it had a 13 second intro. And I didn't, I didn't do that on purpose. And every time I've ever won an award in an award show, I've either been seated in the 13th the 13th row or row M, which is the 13th letter. And when I won the Horizon Award at the C and A. Here's producer Donna Dingwall

with another theory about our complicated relationship with the number 13 that is rooted less in the folklore we've been hearing about and more in our feelings. You know the classic kids joke? Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven, eight, nine? When I was speaking to social scientist Barry Markovsky, I found myself asking, why does 13 hate 12? And I think it's because 12 is kind of a stagehog.

How does that kind of relationship between 12 and 13 maybe play into some of our feelings about number 13? Number 12 happens to be a really popular and useful number. I mean, I like the mathematical aspects of 12. it's divisible by so many other numbers one two three four six and twelve itself um 12 months of the year well there's no 13th we start over again uh 12 hours in the a m part of the day and 12 hours in the p.m. part of the day there's no 13th hour and that kind of sets up 13 in contrast to this really useful friendly familiar number there's a number that is less familiar and this Research in psychology generally shows that things that are familiar,

we're just more comfortable with them. By pointing this out, you know, by saying 13 is an unlucky number and making this declaration, and having that catch on, it offers a kind of anxiety reduction tool. Feels like we have control over it, if we can identify it and label it and kind of shut it aside when possible. And it's a tool that he says can help to explain and why our modern-day conspiracy theories take hold?

We're prone to try to just get a handle on things any way that we can, because uncertainty is very uncomfortable. And if we can find ways that different, maybe seemingly unrelated events, are actually tied in with each other, it feels good to have that kind of understanding, to see a pattern and to make sense of it. and we are definitely pattern-seeking animals. The problem is that we're pretty good at detecting real patterns,

but we're also pretty good at detecting patterns that aren't really there. And to be able to learn to tell the difference, whether it's for something fairly trivial or for something very important, well, my argument is the more important it is to know what the truth is, the more careful you have to be about, making those kinds of errors, about leaping to conclusions, just because a story can be told that fits these different facts together and makes them seem like a coherent pattern. Right. And you called this, or I guess it's called a felt sense of anomaly.

That really resonated with me, because without being able to pin it down, we can be uneasy about something and make associations with whatever that context is. It could be a number. and if the context is right, these associations that we make can actually create emotions in us. They can create a sense of dread. So anything we can do to quell that uneasiness we try to. I have to admit, I couldn't help make my own association on hearing the words uneasy, dread, and emotion in relation to the number 13. And it had nothing to do with superstition. Puberty usually begins at an earlier age in girls than in boys.

Most girls enter puberty at about 12 or 13. What better words describe what it's like to sit in seventh grade health class as a very miscast gym teacher rolls a projector or a VCR into the room to show an ancient film reel that in hindsight would likely qualify as early body horror. Hair begins to grow on the face under the arm. and in the pubic area. Perspiration also increases. For some, the young body may start its growth

by shooting up several inches in a few months. Sometimes one breast will mature more rapidly than the other. This occurs quite often. And that doesn't even touch on the emotional upheaval. What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets. Obviously, doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.

That's a scene from the 2000 film The Virgin Suicides, in which a doctor is admonishing a girl who's been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. For decades, depictions of the transition into the teen years have been a Hollywood staple on screens big and small, in dramas, and in comedy. Tonight marks the last night of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah. Here to explain the story of Hanukkah is my podiatrist's son and recent bar mitzvah boy, Jacob. This sketch, Jacob the Bar Mitzpah boy from Saturday Night Live, perfectly captures the painful awkwardness of age 13. When I first started studying the story of Hanukkah, I was worried it was going to be barring.

But as I learned more about the powerful tale of the Maccabees, I realized that it's actually. pretty neat. But don't tell my parents, I said that. Yet, the character isn't one note. There's an endearing excitement and a hint of pride in Jacob when he shows off his newfound knowledge and public speaking chops. The story of Hanukkah begins in 165 BCE, otherwise known as the year my bubby was born.

The sketch always left me, a parent, and a non-Jew, feeling like my bland Anglo-Saxon heritage left my kids a bit rootless with no cultural or communal support to see them into adulthood. And apparently, I'm not the only one. So this happened when he was sort of nearing 13, maybe a couple of months before he was 13. I could definitely see a shift in Fred. You know, he was starting to push for more freedom, more independence, You know, he wanted to cycle off to faraway places on his own or go to bed later, have more pocket money, go and watch soccer matches on his own, not have a babysitter.

So there's definitely a change, I guess a fairly normal change at that age. Claire Potter is a cookbook and parenting author who lives in the UK. When her son Fred was on the verge of turning 13, it dawned on her that he might benefit from a right-of-passage ceremony. she owes that revelation to what the Brits call a boot sale and the DVD box set she bought out of the trunk of someone's car. And it just so happened at that time. We also were watching the TV series Roots, you know, about the generations of African slaves, the 1970s series. And in the first episode, there's a scene where the boys, probably around 12 years old, were taken off for their right of passage and their. initiation ceremony, you know, like tests of strength and bravery. I think they had to hunt a pig,

something like that. And then it culminated in a horrible circumcision scene. But with the hunting, the bravery, the strength skills, I remember watching Fred's face watching that program and sort of seeing his eyes light up. He was very engaged with that particular scene. So I kind of put those two things together. You know, the changes I was seeing in Fred. and that program and thought, huh, how about making a rite of passage for him? You know, a modern version. Claire set to work DIYing a coming-of-age initiation, Taylor made for her high-spirited, outdoors-loving son, Fred Greenan.

I've always been quite a high level of stimulation, and it was hard to find that within the house. So, yeah, normally found that upper tree or even just having a kickabout. Claire wrote about what she called Fred's modern right of passage in the Guardian newspaper. The column ran just over 13 years ago. Well, I suppose it was a test, really. It's like if you want this, you know, if you want more freedom and independence, let's test if you're ready for it. You know, have you got the maturity to do these things?

Have you got the worldliness? And then at the same time, unless you do things like that, how can you develop the maturity and worldliness? He wasn't the kind of kid who would do sort of prolonged sustained effort with anything, as he just said, you know, stimulation-seeking, quite kind of slapdash about stuff. I remember even like cleaning his teeth was like, you know, too much of a chore. And I put a photo of some rotting teeth in the bathroom just to kind of encourage him to clean his teeth, you know. So I knew it needed to really engage him if he was going to do these certain challenges. They did have to kind of be presented in a fun way, you know, like a TV quiz show kind of feel to it.

I tried to think of different areas of life. Travel, physical challenges, cooking, household chores, performing, artistic. And I got 13 coloured envelopes. I remember that and put one challenge in each envelope. And I would gave Fred the first one. and he could only get the next envelope with the next challenge when he'd done the previous challenge. You know, naturally had they been presented to me as like an enabler of the development of all of these skills, I probably wouldn't have been interested.

So, Claire, because you wrote the list then, tell us about what you set up as the first challenge or first few challenges. Yeah, so the very first challenge, what it said in the envelope was get on a train on your own, get off at the 13th stop. When you get to wherever you get, go to a restaurant, order the 13th item on the menu and eat it, then go shopping with £1313, and buy yourself a whole outfit.

I remember it well because there was a big football match on the same day, which I had hoping to watch. So I think there was maybe an element of mild inconvenience around the timing for me. I'd only ever been in one direction, which is towards London. And so this involved going in the other direction, which I remember being quite excited about. The 13th stop was a place called Hereford, which is the end of the line.

It's right on the border between England and Wales. I do remember, as, you know, I thought this was a great idea for Fred to do this challenge, but I do remember him stepping on the train and me waving goodbye and thinking, oh my goodness, what am I doing? What have I done? Will I ever see him again?

You know, I felt really scared, thinking this may backfire on me, this fun idea. The complication, like the complication, The other element of things was that my parents had actually followed me without me knowing and showed up in Hereford slightly later. I can't remember whether that was a good thing or a bad thing in my mind at the time, but I imagine I was probably a little bit disappointed. You were given £13, is that right, to buy yourself an outfit? Yeah, it was obviously a pretty limited budget, so there was difficulty involved in that. I remember going into a store called Primark.

Yeah, I think I came out with some chinos, a Superman top, and some white shoes. I think your mom might have a different memory of what the shirt was. Can you describe it? Yeah, like the white shoes, white shoes and chinos, yes. The t-shirt said, I was amazing last night. Ask your girlfriend. Say that again. I was amazing last night.

ask your girlfriend, that's what the text was on the T-shirt. And I don't think, you're right. Is that ringing a bell, Fred? Yeah, it was pink. It was, oh, yeah, yeah, that's unlocked a memory. So what was the thought process there? Just curious. I don't actually think you knew what it meant, Fred.

Yeah. At that age. No, I probably wasn't aware of that. But it's funny, I don't know whether I would have picked that because I wanted to be directly provocative or whether it's probably what happened is because of the budget constraints and also what it said on a t-shirt, it was probably heavily reduced, which is why it ended up in the basket. Fred was quite high after Challenge One.

You know, that one kind of played to his strengths and his desire to be free. So challenge number two was do 13 household tasks. There was everything from paying a bill, defrosting. a freezer, ironing, cutting the grass, laundry, and putting up a shelf. I remember that. That was a big chore in itself. And I do remember when he opened that one, he just groaned. Fred, right of response here? Yeah, it sounds like me. I think I still groan when I have to do those things. I think things like paying a bill, you know, when you're not responsible for paying bills at that point in time, it probably did just feel like what would have felt like a very chory chore, but I definitely would have extracted some enjoyment from the more practical tasks.

Well, I can say as the mother of a 20-year-old and a 17-year-old, 13 chores seems like wildly ambitious to me. I can maybe get one out of them, but... Put them in an envelope and... and you'll have no issues. Yeah. Did you accomplish all of the things, or how do you both remember that? Well, my recollection is yes. And he did flag during the day.

And I remember by the time he was putting up the shelf, he was swearing a lot. He was really not happy, but still determined to get it done. That challenge was followed by something a bit more creative, but no less daunting. So that was cook a three-course meal from scratch. but using only recipes from the page 13s of our recipe books that we had in the house.

So to give it that kind of constraint and serve it to the whole family. Yeah. And I remember that went fairly well. I do remember I was in the living room and I could hear, I could smell burning a little bit at one point and I could hear him again swearing. But my urge was to go in and kind of rescue the situation. situation and check my kitchen wasn't on fire. But I managed to hold back and just completely butt out of the whole thing. I'm pretty confident I made Jumballaya. That's, that's my memory.

My mum might be able to correct me. Well, I thought that Fred made pork chalemeng. No, no, it was Jambalaya. It was Jambalaya. Okay. No, I mean, it's open to interpretation, but the intention was jambalaya. I was intended to I do remember it was a bit sort of oversloppy that. But I remember the starter was chicken yakitori, and it was perfect. I do remember that. And I think the dessert was something like chocolatey and it was okay. I think we could say the whole meal was kind of mediocre.

A meal served to your own family can afford to be a bit underwhelming, but the next task involved an audience. Yeah, so I played piano since. a fairly young age, which came from mainly my dad, who also plays the piano. And 12 bar blues is one of the first things that I learned. And so it was kind of one of the more involved types of piano that I was playing. 13 bar blues was an adaptation of that, which I expect includes an extra bar on the end. The challenge was not just learning this song, but playing it in front of strangers at a local venue.

I remember that being a real push. and definitely the most difficult, technically the most difficult thing that I had to do at any point. Of course, layered on top of that was doing it in front of what was a fairly large room of people. I was already was a practicing. At the same time, I didn't want to nag him to practice because then that would kind of go against the whole ethos of giving him these challenges. So I just backed off again. But I was really nervous on the night. I really wasn't sure how well it was going to go.

And he was very nervous as well. I remember the room. I think I was probably in a bit of a, a bit of a haze doing it. I did a duet with my dad, so there was a lot going on. I think I do have a recollection of making a mistake at some point, but fortunately being able to pull through. But it went really well, and he got such applause and cheers from the audience. I remember walking back off the stage, though, and that being a very good feeling.

he says the payoff was huge and he was so high all the way home in the car. We all were actually. I really enjoyed that challenge. Some of the other challenges were a little less successful. It was only a couple of years prior that I came clean about this. So I needed to walk 13 miles from our home to Oxford, which is pretty much exactly 13 miles. I walked about eight and then the sight of the approaching bus just looked too appealing. So I got on the bus and I went the final distance. And I think at the time plan to take that to my deathbed. As he was about 23, when he told me, I'm like, I just found it very funny.

I probably wouldn't have been very amused if I'd found out at the time. But yeah, I thought, well, that's quite Fred, actually. One that stands out for me is the challenge where Fred had to volunteer. for a day. And I'd been looking for something very worthy, like helping in a homeless center, something like that. When you're 13, it turns out you're not allowed to do things like that. Health and safety rules prevent that. There was a sort of farm near us, like one that people could visit with their kids, and they were having a charity event. He was put in charge of the hooker duck stall. Right. And this is the thing where kids,

Kids come with a fishing pole and they try to, as you say, hook a duck. And then the way I've done it before, there's a like a number on the bottom and you get a prize. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, travels across cultures apparently. Yes. At the end of the day, he'd raised something like 500 pound. It was a really popular store.

And I was like, oh, you know, he's going to come away feeling how, you know, how kind he's been, how helpful, how he's raised all that money for charity. But the thing that he said to me was, do you know what, mum? All I had was like a paddling pool and some plastic ducks. And I made 500 pounds, you know, it's really easy to make money if you just got the right mind. Under the pretense of charity. Yes, yes. Today, Fred works in sales in London. So that really stuck my mind.

And I think I can still see that seed in Fred that, you know, has sort of developed as he's got older. what do you feel like you took away from from all of this fred yeah i was reflecting on this uh and it's hard to isolate i mean well the feeling of accomplishment and also uh the framework around wanting that independence and and getting it i think uh also played out for the years after that um this relationship between proving and then earning um the more and more freedom um was definitely you know, something that I carried through in the short term. Longer term, I mean, now I'm incredibly independent, I think pretty pragmatic with how I, like, you know, navigate life. I think I'd be mistaken to think some of that, you know, isn't attributed to this.

I mean, I think one of the main things about it was just marking that change from child to teenager, which we don't do in our culture. I mean, I think that was important. But, you know, rather than just letting Fred sort of slither into teenagedom, kind of going, do you know what, you are different now? Your brain works differently now. Let's kind of recognize that and acknowledge that and mark it and make a fun shared memory while we're doing that.

It also provided an alternative and a more generous narrative to the ones normally attached to turning 13. I think teenagers are so often, thought of as bad or trouble. You know, even when you have a newborn and it's screaming, people will say to you, oh, wait till they're a teenager, going to be a lot worse then. You know, they get a bad press. So I feel like we did something positive with Fred becoming a teenager,

and that made me more comfortable with him doing those things, more comfortable, more quickly than I would have done otherwise. But by doing the 13 challenges, I was forced to let go. Claire, when you think about kind of Fred's trajectory before and after this challenge, what do you, how do you see it? He's extremely confident. I do feel like those challenges helped kind of activate that confidence. And also Fred said to me even quite recently that he hit the mantra that he lives by

is feel the fear and do it anyway. And I feel like that kind of started with the 13. challenges. You know, these things might be scary, but I can do them and I've done them and I feel great now. So that would be my take on it. Whether you're facing the onset of puberty and adulthood or a mysterious misplaced fear about a number, Fred's advice to tackle it head on seems like a good plan. But if that isn't working, maybe a song will help. So I'm going to take a drink of my drink here and then I'm going to sing this song for you if you want me to. Sure.

This is folklore Stephen Winnic with a French-Canadian folk song that suggests common sense is the best defense when it comes to the number 13. It's to the belief that 13 people at dinner is a bad idea. And indeed, it is just the kind of example that I was pointing out where it actually says, that's just a superstition. So the song is called The Pleasier de la Table, the pleasures of the table. It no, we have to do an toll of the employ of the pleasure of the table. That each time preen, upbred to soar, a brunette immobile.

with the va and the and the and the same jollie in the joy in the liberty that we'll pass well

his life it's an an superstition to count 12 or 13 This program was produced by Donna Dingwa Our next episode

in the greatest number of all time series is on the number 12. You can find the series and more on our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. Technical production, Emily Kiervezio and Hannah Barker. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luchic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas

and I'm Nala Ayyad. With the wine and the and the scent of a Femme, jollie in the joy, in the liberty, that we'll pass well his life.

Bravo. So see if you can do anything with that. That was wonderful. Thank you. I feel like I've been serenated. All right. For more CBC podcast,

Go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.