No. 679 - BEING LEFT-HANDED IN A RIGHT-HANDED WORLD

No. 679

Jim Davidson -- NEWSPAPER COLUMN

BEING LEFT-HANDED IN A RIGHT-HANDED WORLD

You may have heard the old joke about the man and his wife who were talking and she said, “If I die before you do, you will probably get remarried won’t, you?’ He said, “Probably.” She continued, “You will probably let her move into our home, won’t you?” He said, “Probably.” Then she said, “You will probably let her sleep in our bed, won’t you? He said, “Probably.” Then she really got personal by saying, “You will probably let her use MY golf clubs, won’t you?” He said, “No, she’s left-handed.” If this story were true, which it’s not, the odds are good that he PROBABLY already had her picked out.
If you are not left-handed, do you have any idea what those who are left-handed go through day after day? Being right-handed, I had never thought much about this before until one day when four of us guys were on our way to play golf. One member of the group was my good friend Larry Fry, who is left-handed. We have played many times before and he usually beats me, but if there are only three of us, we usually ask Larry to ride in a cart by himself, because everything for him is backwards. For example, if you forget to take the right club to make a shot, you can’t use his club and have to walk all the way back to the cart. That’s one of those, “it’s a hard life, but someone has to do it” stories.
As we continued to talk, Larry began to share a number of things that left-handed people have to deal with that most right-handed people miss out on. The most obvious are school desks, which are all for right-handed people. Then he said, “Trying to write in a wirebound spiral notebook is really a challenge, because your left hand is always sitting on top of the wire. To function means that you have to write upside down. This is hard for me to envision, because I have enough trouble writing with my hand in a comfortable, normal position. Then he mentioned that belts and the zipper in pants are always for a right-handed person. Reaching across the fly and turning your hand upside down would not be an easy task, especially if you were in a hurry.
If you are a left-handed person, hopefully you will appreciate what I am saying. Our discussion that day piqued my interest so much that when I got home I went to Google and learned a good deal more than I already knew about being left-handed.
Here are a few tidbits: The left side of the brain is said to be the rational side of the brain. Nine of 10 of the world’s population is right-handed. Generally, males are three times more likely to be left-handed than females. On average, right-handed people live 9 years longer than left-handed people. While it can’t be proven, “lefties” are considered to be more intelligent than right-handed people.
This may be the reason so many of the world’s most successful people are left-handed. Here are the names of some famous left-handers that you will recognize, and the gambit covers all walks of life: Babe Ruth, Larry Bird, Winston Churchill, Julia Roberts, Mark Spitz, Arnold Palmer, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Tom Cruise, Fred Astaire, Bill Gates, Bruce Willis, Albert Einstein and many, many more. Hope your favorite was among them. While it may be inconvenient, left-handers certainly should never hang their head.
I’m grateful for the legacy of left-handed people and their contributions, but in view of the small numbers, you can understand why there are so few products mass-produced for left-handers. However, Larry Fry says that “lefties” have the last laugh. All commodes have the handle on the left side.
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(EDITOR'S NOTE: Jim Davidson is a public speaker and syndicated columnist. You may contact him at 2 Bentley Drive, Conway, AR 72034. To support literacy, buy his book: “Learning, Earning & Giving Back.”)