| Threesies | Toronto Star Life - 06/10/06 | |
-Monty Python and the Holy Grail
A guy, a dog and a skunk limp into a yard.
No, that isn’t the start of a bad joke. That threesome actually happened and all three ended up hobbling around my house because of leg injuries.
Leg injury #1: The guy -my eldest son, shattered his left kneecap while playing hockey at university, requiring emergency surgery, followed by weeks immobile on my couch, plus lengthy rehabilitation. Final prognosis: unknown.
Leg injury #2: The dog, mine, suffered a crutiate ligament injury requiring surgery, followed by weeks immobile in my kitchen, plus lengthy rehabilitation. Final prognosis: unknown.
Leg injury #3: The skunk, also mine I guess since it terrorized my lawn all last summer, was spotted dragging its body across my yard due to… you guessed it, -a broken leg. Animal Control was called, however nothing is known about his rehabilitation as the poor thing was last seen slinking away into the bushes. Final prognosis: unknown.
This hat trick of leg injuries evoked more than three people to tsk sympathetically and remark: “Trouble always comes in threes you know. So you should be good now, right?”
Fervently hoping that the three-peat was indeed a magical number and there’d be no more injuries, I decided to investigate the threesies phenomenon a little further.
Ignoring the obvious Holy Trinity references and seeking triple insights beyond “Veni, vidi, vici”, brought me to www.threes.com. Three cheers for this website, an open forum set up by Michael Eck an instructor at Art Institute of Philadelphia, which archives a staggering number of tripleheaders. (Though the old Rule of Three for diagnosing colic in babies: crying for more than three hours per day, for more than three days per week, and for longer than three weeks in an infant who is otherwise healthy, seems to have been overlooked.)
From the three bears, pigs, stooges, musketeers, blind mice and wisemen to Newton’s three laws of motion (#3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), and Aristotle’s three unities, triplets do strangely seem to keep popping up.
Superstitions are certainly ripe with trios, but here they can be harbingers of both good and bad luck. Three people on a match, three butterflies on a single leaf, bats circling your house three times and owls hooting thrice are all deemed bad.
Who knew that washing your hair on the third day of the month was a good idea? My guess is that bit about a three-legged dog bringing good luck only works if the appendage is actually missing, as opposed to a pooch who’s only just temporarily favouring a heavily bandaged leg.
While three of anything is considered a collection, I really wouldn’t recommend collecting broken things. Take it from me, a trifecta of busted-up limbs is definitely something that should be avoided.
So, after all my research am I convinced that the universe is truly ruled by threes?
Well, even though I can’t help wonder about my karma, (What exactly did I send forth that caused broken legs to come back to me threefold?), I guess the short answer is no. Even though the broken legs did happily stop after the tripleheader, no, I’m not convinced about this trichotomy theory. She said, reaching out to rap three times on the nearest wooden object while simultaneously spitting on the ground three times... you know, just in case there’s a triad of evil spirits still lurking about.