Sinister

Today is National Left Hander's Day!!! Happy Day to all of you sinister people.

Being left handed is a defining part of who I am. My mother tells that, as an obedient first grader, I put my pencil in my right hand as the teacher directed. My mother wondered why no papers came home from school so she went over to the school to find out. The teacher showed her my papers which were all written in mirror writing. Once my mother explained that, duh!, I was left-handed, the mirror writing stopped. (An interesting side issue here is that in those days parents could not call a teacher to ask a question. Chicago Public School phone numbers were not even published!)

I actually give a lot of credit to this first grade teacher who, unfortunately, I don't remember at all. In 1952 most left handed children were still being forced to write with their right hands. Not only did she not force me to change, she also simply told me to tilt my paper to the right instead of the left and to write like everyone else. As a result, I have never written in the awkward curved hand position common to many other sinister people.

I may not look weird when I write, but writing has always been difficult. Left handers push the pen across the page, a much more tiring movement than the pulling done by the rest of the world. I've spent most of my life with ink stains on my left pinkie. When we used fountain pens in my middle school years it was the worst, but even now ink from many types of ball point pens also smears as my hand goes over the words I just wrote. During my teaching years I had multi-colored left hands as a result of using erasable overhead projector pens all day long. I LOVE typing - it doesn't hurt or stain - and I can go out in the evening without having to explain why my hand is purple and green!

I despise cutting with a scissors because the blade is always on the wrong side. Not only is is painful but, unlike you non-sinister people, I can't see the line that I'm cutting. I would prefer to draw a line from right to left, but rulers have numbers facing the wrong direction. Don't get me started on ring binders, spiral notebooks, or "one-armed" student desks in all the college classrooms!

Then there's the kitchen: measuring cups with the markings on the wrong side, ladles that only have one spouted side, can openers and cheese slicers and potato peelers and corkscrews that can only be used in the right hand!

At one point, four out of five foreign language teachers in my school were all left-handed. Did the constant use of both sides of our brains help us learn another language? My friend Susan who often subbed for me says I drove her crazy because the papers with my seating charts were placed on the clip board with the clip to the right! I drive Ken crazy with my mouse on the left side of the computer monitor.

To more fully understand the plight of our 10% of the population, I refer you to http://www.lefthandersday.com/about.html. Certain family members who like to buy funny gifts for holidays and birthdays may find interesting items there :-)

In the meantime, there is hope for left-handers. President Obama may be having trouble getting the country on board with his health care plans, but every time he signs a bill its "one left-handed signing for a man, one left-handed signing for mankind." Yes, we (left-handers) can!