This is the first Friday the 13th in something like 40 years that I have faced without my “lucky” coin.

My lucky coin is — and I should say “was” — a 1971 Eisenhower silver dollar. I was given one as a gift a very long time ago, during the eight-year period in the 1970s when the coin was issued. I liked the 1971 edition of the coin, in particular, because it was the first year the coin was out, and because it was the year I graduated from high school.

It also was just plain cool. The Eisenhower side of the coin is a bit dull; but the reverse shows an eagle landing on the moon, and in the background you can see the earth, which is oriented towards the western hemisphere. A coin that big (and it’s 1.5 inches across, and heavy, too) … you can put actual art on it.

Anyway, I decided it was lucky. Maybe just because silver dollars have been rare in the U.S. for most of a century. Even the ones, like this one, that weren’t really silver.

It wasn’t presented to me as lucky. And I can’t actually recall any instances of massively lucky moments. No lotteries won, no horses coming in; but I rarely gamble, and have never played the lottery. Can’t blame the coin for that.

I never spent it, of course, and carried it around in my right-front pants pocket any time I went outdoors. Before leaving a house, I picked up my wallet, folding money, keys — and my lucky silver dollar.

Now that I think back, the silver dollar was not so much lucky as it was meant to fend off bad luck. And for that, it seemed to do a fine job. Nothing disastrous has befallen me. Yet. I suppose the coin was more of an amulet than a good-luck piece.

And, truth be told, my most recent Eisenhower dollar was at least the second and maybe the third “lucky” coin of that variety that I had carried. Over 40 years, you are going to lose one, now and then. Each time, however, I immediately designated a replacement 1971 Eisenhower coin, and off I went.

Over the past year or so, my lucky coin collection began to get a little out of hand. I had my silver dollar, of course, the big one. (It was often noted and remarked upon at security-screening sites. Had to take it out, and non-Americans, in particular, would say, “What is that?” A U.S. silver dollar is an enormous coin.)

Anyway, the other coins.

I began carrying a 2-euro coin almost a decade ago. I just thought it was cool. Two segments, an inner and an outer, and the “obverse” side of it varies from country to country, inside the euro zone. Thing is, whenever I visited a country in the euro zone, my “lucky” 2-euro coin often became mixed up with a coin I’d gotten while buying a baguette and … well, it certainly wasn’t the ont I started with, but it was my backup lucky coin, anyway.

The third coin to enter my “lucky” collection was a freakish UAE coin. It is a one-dirham coin that is overly large. It seems as if it might have been minted before 1996, which makes it practically a museum piece in this country, which barely remembers the 20th century. The UAE doesn’t put dates on its coins, but this thing has to be old because of its size. And I don’t even remember how I got it. Came in change, I suppose.

Then my fourth coin: A Turkish one-lira piece. Just because I went to Istanbul, and because it was like a memento. But I must concede that it went into the “lucky coin” rotation.

By then, the lucky coin collection was getting out of hand. The smaller coins were banging around in my pocket and rubbing against the No. 1 coin, and it seemed to be damaging my 1971 Eisenhower dollar.

So, I was in Uzbekistan last month for a UAE football match, and I had my lucky coins with me. They are never more necessary than when flying, especially on second-tier airlines like Uzbek Airways.

It was becoming a hassle to travel with my four coins, because I repeatedly was pulling them all out of my pocket to go through a magnetometer, and it seemed only a matter of time before I lost one — or more.

That moment came on my way out of Tashkent. I was wearing a new pair of Gap cargo pants, and they have treacherous pockets. If you sit back, at all, things will spill out of all four pockets on the front part of the pants. I took a cab, in the dark, and I believe the silver dollar rolled out of my pocket in the cab. (Either that, or I somehow left it at the hotel, which I doubt.)

So, no coin, getting on a plane … I texted: “If this plane goes down, you know why.”

And, yes, it is fair to ask just how lucky a coin is if it can leap out of my pocket. (Like the Ring of Power abandoning Gollum under the Misty Mountains?)

Back to Friday the 13th. (You wondered when I would get back to that.)

I absolutely did think about not having my original coin for the unlucky day. But nothing unusual or bad happened, far as I know. I worked, covered a soccer match … and nothing weird.

A story in The National from a year ago, upon which I blogged about, notes that Arabs have a different approach to good luck and bad luck, in terms of what constitutes each. Turns out, they don’t really notice Friday the 13th. Maybe I was covered by the local apathy.

I do still have the other three perhaps lucky coins; amulets. Maybe that spared me.

The thing is … I don’t really believe it makes a difference. It’s more of a “just in case” thing. And a conversation topic.

I would like to get another Eisenhower silver dollar, circa 1971, and sooner than later, but I realize it’s not going to happen in the UAE, which means weeks or months without one.

I think I will get through. I survived Friday the 13th, anyway.