An article in todays Washington Post has some fun with the viewthat celebrities die in groups of three, something verified this week with the deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson. I never heard this as applied to celebrities, but my mother firmly believed that bad things come in threes. This provided me some relief when I had to come home from school in Manhattan and tell my parents that I had been suspended from Cathedral College, minor seminary of the Archdiocese of New York. I walked into the kitchen and told my mother, "Ive got bad news." "Oh no! What?" "Ive been suspended from school." "Oh, thank God!" she said. She proceeded to tell me that one of my sisters had been in a minor traffic accident, and another had needed stitches after cracking her head open against an old iron radiator. She knew that some third bad thing was going to happen to one of her children, and was very anxious about what it would be. That it was a mere suspension from school she could deal with.Was this a common belief? That is, among others besides Brooklyn-born Irish?Any other old truths that got us started on the way to learning to cope with the universe?