Show of Hands

Both my mother and father are/were right handed. I, too, am right handed. I believe my brothers and sisters may all be left-handed. They tend to wear gloves and in some cases, mittens, which doesn't help my situation very much (I can't tell when Jill is flipping me off so I just assume always). My wife is left-handed. Our two children are right handed though our son, Patrick, an avid though more often now erstwhile, footballer, is left-footed.

One of his coaches used to suggest 'he only uses his right leg to help him stand up.' I think he more than made up for that perceived shortcoming with a booming left footed kick that could drive a soccer ball through a wall, though judging by the way defense men moved out of its path, why take that chance?

Our daughter, Michelle, plays a variety of musical instruments, strings and things, all of them in the conventional manner with no restringing required and no mirrors used, a la Paul McCartney and his bass playing, to reverse the finger patterns for placement on an instrument's frets.

I was thinking about all of this a bit more intently and intensely than is normal for me (especially the 'my sister with mittens' part) because I found an article on "The Health Risks of Being Left-Handed" in the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch media outlet that still makes some sense, that without the Internet I doubt that I'd have ever seen.

I'm familiar with a reasonable amount of the popular literature on handedness, population divisions between left handers and right handers (did you know that 'sinister' comes from the Latin sinistra, meaning 'left'? Finally put those years of prep school dead language lessons to use) and brain lateralization. We are an amazingly complex life-form; pink and soft on the outside, crunchy in the middle, with a gooey filling. And as amazing as left and right handedness may be, it's always more impressive to me to see what we can get accomplished when we join them together.
-bill kenny