Seeing the Signs

Itchy Palms: Money In, Money Out

When I was nineteen years old, I got my first “real” job. I had worked, like all kids do, at babysitting and yard work, and I had done a little sales. But I had never worked a full-time job, Monday to Friday, forty hours a week. Just looking for work was almost a full-time job. The summer of 1979 was my punk rock summer – I had self-butched hair and wore too much black eye-liner and I looked like a fraud in office clothes. Eventually though, I landed a job at a coffee company. They must have been really desperate to find help, because I was hired as the assistant bookkeeper and I didn’t know a thing about bookkeeping, other than my grandfather had been an accountant and I could add in my head.
The head bookkeeper was a woman named Ginny and she was about forty, which was old to me in those days. But looking back, she was really hot. She had legs to die for and always wore form-fitting clothing and high-heeled mules. She smoked cherry-flavored cigars. And she knew her stuff. She had me trained in no time. She was no-nonsense but nice; we got along perfectly. I had to make entries in a huge ledger, one check after another, adding them all up on an old adding machine with a lever like a one-armed bandit in a western casino. It used to get stuck every so often and I’d had to play with it until it worked again.
It was Ginny who told me about the meaning of itchy palms. I can’t remember if it was my right palm or my left palm that was itchy that particular day, but she told me that if it was my right palm that was itching, it meant that money was “coming in”, and if it was my left palm, money was “going out.” In my experience, this has held true.
When I checked on the internet to see what other people had to say about this, most other sources agreed with Ginny – an itchy right palm meant “money in”, while an itchy left palm meant “money out”. However, a few asserted that it was the other way around. One 73-year old woman felt her left palm itch, and believing that money was coming in, got off the bus she was riding, and bought a Mega-Millions ticket. She won the jackpot. (CBSnews.com)
Urban Dictionary agrees with Ginny about the right and left/in- and out-flow of money but also advises against itching the right palm while it is itchy or else the money will never materialize. It also says that an itchy left palm means sleeping with an ugly “chick” and regretting it. (UrbanDictionary.com)
Other sources say that if you can’t bear the itchiness of your right palm and don’t want to ruin the magic of incoming money, then rub it on wood. Wood being a lucky element, this will ground the magic, hence the term “Touch Wood”. (buzzle.com)
All cultures have sayings about itchy palms and it is a subject that could be researched and written about in much more detail that I can here. Myself, I am sticking to what Ginny told me thirty-five years ago – an itchy right palm means money in and an itchy left palm means money out.
Blessings to all!
References
CBS News. “Granny’s Fateful 64M Itch”. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/grannys-fateful-64m-itch/
“Itchy Palms Superstitions”. http://www.buzzle.com/articles/itchy-palms-superstitions.html
Lagerston, Kenneth. “Palmistry and Hand Analysis” http://palmistryandhandanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/07/itching-palms-and-money.html
“Urban Dictionary: Itchy Palm”. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=itchy%20palm