Left-Handed Cabal

One July morning over coffee, I’m speaking with my friend Quinzel, who goes by “Q.” He’s telling me about Jason, a kindergartener on the basketball team that he coaches through an after school program. I’d been telling Q about wonders I’ve had about empathy and partiality, about why we favor some people over others.

“Yeah, it’s true,” Q says, “some kids are going to get more attention from me than others. Like, when a kid shows me he cares, I’m going to help him more. But man, I know exactly what you mean.”

Q spends most days coaching youth and tutoring them; he teaches children to read, tries to build up their self-confidence and work ethic. This kid Jason, he says, just couldn’t seem to follow instructions and was listless and daydreaming at basketball practice. When he started screwing around with other kids so much that he became a distraction, he was removed from the program for a time. Though Q knows his kids face tough home and school circumstances, he admits he’s usually partial to kids who don’t act like Jason.

But then something happened. While shooting baskets together one afternoon, Q saw that Jason, with his knees properly bent and eyes and toes properly pointed toward the hoop, tossed the ball with his left hand and guided it with his right. Most people, because they’re right-handers, do the opposite. Except for people like Q. He’s left-handed.

And, apparently, so was Jason.

In that moment, Q says, when he realized Jason was left-handed, everything changed. He suddenly found himself talking with Jason more, encouraging him during practice. Just like that, Q was giving more of his attention to Jason than the other kids.

(I should also note that Q is obsessive about basketball. I swear his son was only fifteen months old when he began shooting hoops with a Nerf basketball and, following his father’s detailed instructions, making those shots. So, having witnessed Jason’s proper shooting stance, Q’s passion for coaching Jason may well have been heightened by his tremendous passion for balling in the first place. This, too, would surely feed Q’s partiality for a kid.)

“Yeah, Mark, I know exactly what you mean,” Q says, sitting up straighter in his seat and speaking with a new enthusiasm. “I treated Jason differently.”

“Are you serious? I mean, Jason’s left-handedness really made you do more for him?”

“Absolutely.”

When I get home that night, I mention this to my wife at the time, Cynthia, who also happens to be left-handed. Her eyes go wide and she smiles and, before commenting on anything else her hard-working husband has shared about his tiresome day, she exclaims, “I didn’t know Q was left-handed!”

I nod my head.

“Yeah,” I say, and then pause before adding, tentatively, “You’re pretty excited about the fact. Does that matter to you?”

“Well, of course. Definitely.”

In this moment, a veil falls from my eyes. As a right-hander, I’ve apparently had no clue about how left-handers might feel. Being right-handed is a simple preference for using one hand over another, I’d naively figured, going about my days heedlessly and presumptuously using scissors and sitting in school desks made for righties. But for the first time I glimpse what’s apparently a left-handed clique, a secret, left-handers’ lovefest to which I have never before been privy and to which I will never gain entry.

I’ve since learned just how much lefties suffer — and in turn feel solidarity with one another — because they live in a right-handed world: Lefties must to do it the righty way in such mundane tasks as putting on a belt, working with power tools, using a can opener or drinking fountain, hugging and kissing (do you lean to the left or right?), shaking hands, buying a baseball glove, locking the front door, smudging all that ink and graphite while writing, grabbing someone else’s drink at the dinner table, and then those pesky scissors and school desks. Some researchers even claim that, on average, left-handers get into more accidents and die younger than righties. Never before had I realized just how much wretched hardship had been foisted upon 10 percent of the population. And how said suffering had fostered such a fervent unity. But in this moment, I am enlightened.

So I read up on their left-handed cabal. I discover I’m having these conversations with Q just weeks before International Lefthanders Day, August 13th. So I commit to celebrating the holiday. Shopping even more lamely than I do on other holidays and birthdays, I get on my laptop and scan through e-cards — and, yes, e-cards for International Lefthanders Day do in fact exist — but then blithely close my computer with a defeated sigh. It just doesn’t matter, I decide, if I give International Lefthanders Day greeting cards to the lefties in my life. It just wouldn’t mean much, coming from a righty.