Claire Katz!September 10th, 2015!Dr. Woodard!!

A Silly Superstition!

! Our tiny silver Subaru crawls slowly into the tunnel, forcing almost everyone and

everything in it to go silent. The radio crackles and manages to sputter out few audible

words, and my mother and I look at each other and smile. Since she was a child she’d

held her breath while passing through these terrifying traffic traps, and I had adopted it

when I was young. But this time is different. The entire purpose of this trip to Boston is

to drop my best friend, Robert, at the airport so that he can fly back home to Texas. His

confused and concerned looks as all conversation stops, mid sentence, as we enter the

tunnel speaks for himself. He sits in silence for a moment longer, attempting to

understand the situation, thinking back to past conversations and wondering if he

missed something drastically important related to our actions at this moment.

Metaphorically, he comes back empty handed and proceeds to ask no one in particular

in the car “What’s going on?” My mother and I shoot glances at each other and try to

hold back our laughs, which would inadvertently cause us to breathe.!

! We near the end of the first tunnel only to be greeted by a second, no more than

500 feet away. As my mother and I both let our exhausted lungs find new air, I rush to

explain what is happening, but all I manage to get out is,

“EVERYTIMEWEGOINTOATUNNELWEDOTHISTHINGWHEREWEHOLDOURBREATH

ESOTHATTHETUNNELWON’TCOLLAPSEBECAU—“!

! We enter the second tunnel with hardly enough time for me to obtain a large last

breath, but luckily, this tunnel is significantly shorter than the first. Robert looks from me

to my mother with an even more puzzled look than during the first tunnel, no doubt

trying to answer all of the questions spinning around in his head such as, “Why would

holding your breath keep the tunnel from collapsing?” and “Is this even safe? It’d be

much worse if one of you passed out from lack of oxygen…” !

! We sighed at the exact moment we exited the tunnel and looked at Robert’s still

obviously confused expressions. Of all the things he could’ve said or asked, he settled

for, “You guys are weird.”