Celebrating "International Left-Handers Day"

Since roughly 90% of the world's population is right handed, It is interesting to me, how many left-handed friends an family I have. (but maybe not so surprising)

I was commenting back and forth with a blogging friend, whose way of looking at things seemed so much like mine, I happened to ask, "Are you sure you're not left handed?" Her response was, "Yes, I am".

Last summer I was visiting my Son's family in Colorado, and when it came to dinner time, we gathered around the table and as usual, I looked for the left-handed corner. Surprise ... it just so happened that everyone in the room was left-handed.

Three of my six children are left-handed, and when we played games, we would team up with lefties against righties ... and soon the righties started calling out "No fair!" I think we did have an advantage because we were more apt to think alike when it came to games.

I never heard from my own kids that they faced the challenges in school that I did. In elementary school, we used ink pens  for writing, dipped into an ink well. I tried to avoid the inky hand by turning the paper clockwise and writing from top to bottom and right to left ... much like Japanese.
Of course, the teacher would walk around the room, and make me turn my paper the "right" way, messing everything up.

When we began cursive writing, the teacher stood at the blackboard and demonstrated by writing from in front, to off to the side. Great, I could do that too but I moved from the front to the left and everything came out in mirror writing.  It was much easier and faster and I didn't drag my hand through the ink. In fact, in college, I took all my notes that way as it was faster and easier to keep up. Sometimes my classmates would ask, "Were you in class today? did you take notes? Can I borrow them?" When they couldn't read them, I just said to hold them up in the mirror.

From Junior high, the desks were all right-handed. I had to sit sideways to take notes and when we had tests, the teacher thought I was copying the person in the next row.

Because you meet big numbers by adding smaller ones, starting with the ones column, then the tens then the hundreds ... I learned to write numbers backwards. If the teacher read off the problems, I had to wait for the whole number before I could write it down. By then the teacher was on the next problem. From those days, I have never been able to do things that involve numbers. I tried to take HS math. every Friday we took a test and every Monday the teacher re-seated the class in according to the test scores. As you might guess, I was always in the last seat ... unless there was a student that had been absent. When I went to College, I was required, in addition to the regular hours I had to take, to take extra classes to make up for what I needed to get into college in the first place. Somehow I managed all but the math. If I couldn't pass HS math, how was I going to take college math???

Well, I was working summers at a girl's camp and one of the staff was a HS math teacher. He brought me a geometry book and all summer I did every-other problem in the book. At the end of the summer, I went into his school and took the years worth of tests. He passed me with a "B" and said it would have been an "A" because I got all the answers right, except that I had taken the long way around to get those answers. BUT, while I was doing all that homework, sitting at the diningroom table, my father looked over my shoulder and said, "Why are you writing your numbers that way?" What way? What do you mean? He said I was writing them from right to left ... well, what was wrong with that? Well, he tells me that numbers should be written left to right! Here I am going into my senior year of college and no one had ever noticed!

Yes, I have never been able to deal with numbers ... counting above 20 I start to get screwed up. I have to count over and over again until I get the same answer more than once ...
Now I have to admit, THE LOST HAS BEEN FOUND because it was never lost to begin with!
Yes, all the blocks are lined up better than I am. Good advice to just carry on carrying on, and they will show up.

So, I return to my sewing. Thunder is crashing all around outside and I am waiting for the delivery of some registered mail that I missed being out last week. I do not know if this thunder will bring rain, but I'm not going out anyway. The camera will have to wait until tomorrow.

Thanks for kind words from my left-handed friends and some very understanding righties too.