Thoughts from the left side

So today is International Left-Handers Day. I didn't get any cards.

In fact, I didn't even know there was such a thing until a friend of mine (whose husband is left-handed), posted a funny pie chart in which the vast majority of people, when they notice someone writing left-handed, say, "Are you left-handed?"

Being left-handed means using those little scissors with the green handles and wiping ink smudges off your hands. It means always eating with your elbows close to your sides to protect yourself from chicken-winging right-handers and hearing people shout "LEFTY!" when you walk into the batter's box.

"Sinister" and "gauche" have their roots in left-ness, and I'm sure most of us have heard and said "If the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain controls the left side, then left-handers are the only people in their right minds" more often than we can count.

But in a world that finds us odd, being left-handed is just ... what I am. And it's not weird at all.

I've made some allowances for a right-handed world. I've known how to cut with right-handed scissors for years, and I was so used to right-handed desks in school that I usually refused on the rare occasions there was a left-handed desk available and someone offered. (To the righties reading this who may ask, "What's the difference?" a right-handed desk has the little area for your books and notebooks attached to the right side of the chair, while it's obviously the reverse for a left-handed desk. The intent is to not have to read or write across your body, but I got used to it.)

If I'm casually driving with one hand on the steering wheel, it's usually my right hand, and for whatever reason, I cannot type on a smartphone with my left hand at all.

Strangely enough, I've come to believe that one of the benefits of being left-handed is that lefties are aware that most of us have two hands. No matter how left-dominant a person is, it is a physical impossibility to be purely left-handed. The world isn't set up that way. However, I know right-handed people who can't do much with their left hand because they've never had to.

Yet using my left hand (or foot) to write, eat, throw, kick, roll a bowling ball, shoot a basketball (badly) or swing a bat or golf club (also badly) is as natural to me as breathing. There was no point where I realized I was left-handed, at least not that I remember, and I didn't have to be taught to do things with my left hand. I just did them, and fortunately, I'm young enough to have missed the era where left-handed kids were encouraged if not forced to change.

Sadly, the one thing I never learned how to do with my left hand was throw a curveball. Otherwise, I might still be pitching in the big leagues in my early 40s and be millions of dollars richer. (Jesse Orosco and Tony Fossas are our patron saints.)

So to all my fellow southpaws out there, Happy International Left-Handers Day. To the right-handers in my life, I like presents, but money and gift cards are nice, too.