One is sorrow, two is joy...

My husband always looks for another magpie rather religiously if he finds one. 

It's a bit like kids in Japan hiding their thumbs when they see a funeral car, well at least when I was a kid, all my friends did it.

I know it sounds quite weird but it is/was believed if you do not hide your thumb when you see a funeral car, you will not be with your parents when they die.　Well, there are quite a lot of 'you can not be with your parents when they die' in Japanese superstitious and this one was one of those. I kind of understand the theory behind it. In Japanese, thumb is called 'parent finger (Oya-yubi)' so if you hide your parent fingers, they are not taken away by the funeral car...

As a kid you don't really know what it is like 'you can not be with your parents' thing, but all my friends religiously hide the thumbs.　

I guess 'one is sorrow, two is joy' seems to be rather simple and innocent.