Left Handed

I don't know why I'm left handed. I just am, that's all. The only left handed person in my family. Though if you know me, you know that I could hardly be anything but left handed: it just fits with my temperament, is all.

I write left handed. Couldn't write right handed to save my life; or at least if I try, it looks like I was holding the pen in my teeth; and writing right handed makes me feel like my nerves are jangling and about to explode. I don't write with my left hand all curled around like some lefties, either. I hold the pen normally, upright, only with my left hand. I do have to watch out for my hand smearing the ink, though.

In the lower grades they taught us some bland and unimaginative cursive script, which was posted on the wall above the blackboard. Starting in fifth grade, I chucked that style of writing, at least for personal use: the loops and curves of it induced that nerve-jangling feeling in me. Instead, I sat down and methodically figured out how I was going to write. By the time I was into seventh grade, I was "fluent" in my own style of handwriting. That style has continued to age and mellow over the years. Doesn't look like anything you ever saw in a cursive style manual, either. Something like the chrome lettering on an automobile. Though more chaotic and all-over-the-place.

Oddly enough, I continued up into my early twenties to use the standard cursive style I'd originally been taught, when I was writing for other people to read. Though I haven't used that standard style now in over twenty years— doubt I could write that way any more. In these latter days, it's my own style of handwriting, or nothing.

I do almost everything left handed. The only exceptions are punching the buttons on a calculator, dialing a phone number, or holding a baseball bat. Yes, I'm left handed, but I bat right handed. Though I'm left footed, as I remember well from setting up my starting blocks in track back when I was in high school.

I cut paper with scissors left handed, though I use regular right handed scissors, held in my left hand— and unlike some lefties, I have no trouble holding or using them. What I've never been able to use, with either hand, are those special "left handed" scissors.

It's a commonplace one-liner that left handed people are the only ones who are in their right mind. Truth is, I wonder if it isn't more nearly the other way around. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was left handed, and he used to wonder if his left handedness impacted his way with words: Peirce could write passages of great beauty and power, but more often his words and thoughts tangled and clotted on the page. I find my own use of words sometimes flows, though it's woolly and disordered and very nonlinear. No doubt someone out there has studied the incidence of left handed people in writing, the arts, and sports: I may be mistaken to surmise that we southpaws are over-represented in these fields, but somehow I suspect not.

When I was ten, a friend of mine dropped a conundrum on me that I've never been able to solve. He told me that actually everyone experiences the world as if they're left handed: it's just that right handed people perceive the world around them in mirror image from the way left handed people perceive it.

I know that's plumb crazy, but I've never been able to refute it. :-)