When I was a child I was smitten with the idea of being ambidextrous. Family lore said that my grandfather on my mother's side was ambidextrous and could do a task equally with either hand. I felt that this was a sure sign of greatness so I wanted it for myself. It did not daunt me that I was apparently right handed. I figured that I too was ambidextrous, but it hadn't revealed itself to me yet.
Now my cousin was left handed and that was just a disaster. He couldn't use a normal pair of scissors and you had to watch him around toys because he would invariably wind them the wrong way and break the mechanism. That was what had happened to my Mr. Potato Head doll. One day it was able to march around when you wound him up and then Bobby got his hands on him and Mr. Potato Head became a static toy. Oh, you could still put on the different noses and eyes and stuff, but now he had to lead a boring life of immobility. So being left handed was a royal pain in my opinion.
Being right handed was normal and thus boring. One of the reasons I felt I had a chance at the wonders of ambidexterity was because I could not tell my left from my right. Now, I knew the terms and I could tell that one hand was different from the other, but I couldn't always tell you which was my right hand. Instead of being overcome with shame at this handicap I chose to view it as a portent of greatness.
In order to facilitate my upcoming manifestation of ambidexterity I practiced being left handed every chance I got. I tried writing with my left hand but that never produced very neat results, so I began to slant my letters backwards when I wrote with my right hand. This made my writing look left handed and I felt that was helping me towards my goal.
My English teacher noticed my peculiar writing style and told me that I must not slant my letters that way. I tried to point out that the left handed children's letters were slanted in this direction but that did not sway her. "Those poor left handed children cannot help themselves," she said . She went on to say that since I was not left handed and I could slant my letters the proper way, I had better do that or else. Sometimes I would have that effect on a teacher. We would start out in a reasonable conversation and then after a few questions from me they would get all 'do it or else'. So I gave up trying to practice at school and continued to practice at home.
Perhaps this practice at being left handed was part of the reason my lack of knowing left or right continued into my adulthood. Not only did I fail to achieve my goal of ambidexterity but I managed to give myself a good dose of non-dexterity. The funny thing was that I wasn't very aware of what I was lacking. You might be surprised how infrequently an adult has to use left or right. It seldom comes up in normal events or conversation.
Where it does come up - and often - is in driving. I can remember one very memorable event when I was the passenger and my girlfriend was driving. I was looking down at the map and we were coming up on an intersection. She asked, "Which way? Left or Right?" I helpfully called out, "Uhhhhh." You might think in that situation I could have just signaled which way to go with a hand gesture, but actually there was a great probability that if I was gesturing with my right hand, I would probably be saying "Go left."
I get lost on my own while driving very frequently. The peculiar thing is that my gut instinct in a driving situation when faced with a choice of turning left or right is always wrong. Always. There has never been a single situation that I can recall that I have ever chosen the correct direction. Sometimes I am absolutely positively sure I am making the correct choice. Other times I am uncertain. It all amounts to the same - I turn the wrong way. They say that in a coin toss if you get every single answer wrong that this is indicating something. I think they are implying that the unconscious mind might be so powerful that it is thwarting you. All I know is that either way, I am screwed and having to turn the car around yet again.
I once heard that during the Civil war, when they were training the farm boys as soldiers it turned out that many or even most of them did not know their left from their right. This made it impossible for them to march following the marching commands of 'Left foot, Right foot'. It turns out that left and right differentiation is something you must be taught. They solved this problem by putting a piece of straw in the recruits right boot and a piece of hay in the left boot. These farm boys knew the difference between hay and straw. They could then get them to march correctly by calling out 'Hay foot, Straw foot'. Unfortunately, this kind of creative adaptation is not available to our fast paced modern world.
I have to a very large degree recovered from my non-dexterity. I did it by involving myself in a practice that required that I know my left from my right hand. I practiced Tai Chi. It was harrowing at first and during my first few lessons I ended up in tears at the end of each class. I could not tell which hand the instructor was using nor which foot was forward. I could not do the simplest of the movements. I was so distressed I almost bought a couple of pairs of red gloves. I wanted the instructor to wear a red glove on his right hand and I would wear a red glove on my right hand so that I would know which hand was which. I never became brave enough to ask him to do this, so instead, since I had no other option, I learned my left from my right.
These days when I say to go left there is a greater than 95% chance that I really mean go left. I almost never forget which hand is my right. But sometimes, when I am distracted or very, very tired I will do something with my left hand that I normally do with my right. At these times I look down and just for a moment there is no such thing as left or right. Just for a moment I am ambidextrous.
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