21 years of bad luck.

My wife got a new vanity, which means she has a much nicer place to apply her makeup and such. So the mirror over the old bureau was sentenced to the trash collectors.

It's one of those trifold mirrors, so you can be discouraged by your reflection in three different angles. 

You know the type.

I've mentioned before that our garbagemen will take anything -- anything but a solid-iron basketball hoop bracket, that is. It's the only thing I have seen them refuse. So I duly schlepped the mirror(s) out to the curb for pickup. 

But then the old paganistic superstitious side of me piped up and said, "They're gonna bust that mirror. Are you consigning them to seven years of bad luck? No, wait, twenty-one years? Or will it just redound to you, since you're the one making them do it?"  

So then I wondered how we got into the superstition about broken mirrors and the very specific sentence of seven years' bad luck for the crime. 

According to an article by the University of South Carolina's Barry Markovsky, Romans first made mirrors from polished metals and "believed their gods observed souls through these devices. To damage a mirror was considered so disrespectful that people thought it compelled the gods to rain bad luck on anyone so careless." As for the seven years, Romans "believed that the body renewed itself every seven years," so once your body had been replaced entirely from the time of the breakage, you would be a new person and unbound by your disrespectful act. 

Were the Romans nutty about this? Maybe they were just off by a few years. You may have heard the estimate that 98 percent of our body's atoms are replaced every year, and if you want to go down the quantum rabbit hole on this, be my guest. I ain't got time for that now. 

I can only say that I don't believe the Roman gods are watching me through the mirror, so I eschew the notion that I'm going to have bad luck until 2043 if those three mirrors break. In fact, I'd wager that if I do have bad luck until then, it’s just my own bad karma, that's all.