Lost tribe

She was taking notes of something I'd written on the board but she'd turned the page so the left to right lines were oriented up and down, and was writing as if in Chinese from top to bottom, yet the letters were not stacked, but side by side. When the page was turned back to normal, the words read normally left to right. Bizarre, but immediately recognizable.

As a leftie, I've always looped my hand around the top of the page and written from top down as if by window washers. Or, if I write from below, I've used a backhand that makes my letter look as if  being blown  over backward by a great wind from the right of the page. Writing with a pencil left the meaty side of my left hand gray with graphite. The contortions of my student were her accommodation to the fact that this is a right-hander's world. (I couldn't write as she did.) Keyboards will make leftism virtually undetectable soon.

Leaving aside the fact that a southpaw just won the world series, lefties sometimes raise eyebrows. You write like that? Why can't you use scissors? A left-handed baseball glove? It's not a disability so much as an flip-side alternative that sometimes manifests itself as an incompatibility downgraded to an inconvenience. Handedness in the form of chirality manifests through organic chemistry and in the form of helicity, throughout quantum dynamics. Geometrically, it's a symmetry that requires a third dimension for its transformations. I know someone whose internal organs are reversed left to right from the norm, but who functions perfectly normally nonetheless.

Why there are so many righties and so few lefties is mysterious, but other dualities have this bias in their distribution: matter and anti-matter, for instance, don't seem to be equally represented in our work-a-day world. Leaving aside those who through the institutional rigidity or superstition (many disapprove or are fearful of it) have been forced to become right-handed, lefties stand at about 10 percent of the world's population.

None of this has much impact on my life, but when I meet another sinister person, I feel a certain connection, as if I'm part of a tribe whose totem is the twisted hand. You, my left handed student, seem like a distant relative, or perhaps like a secularized co-religionist. We're so assimilated we're hardly aware of our distinctiveness--until the design bias of the world puts us on the spot.

We're not militant people, only sometimes exasperated. Pleased to meet you.