It is interesting to note how much stuff resides upstairs.

By upstairs I mean our minds.

I am fascinated by the poets who explore the places that most people don’t go to.

I often think that we live within certain structures that are not really who we are but what passes for all the stones that have been placed into the chimneys of our lives.

In other words…we are not what we think. Entirely. We are certainly a part of that. But not entirely defined by it. I like African music, but that doesn’t make me African by any means.

What I am talking about is how far into ourselves do we have to go to find out who we really are.

What makes us tick.

I remember talking to my mother several years ago. In the course of the conversation, it was determined  that I was a lefty at birth and that my mother, as was the  convention at the time (the 50’s), turned me into a righty.

Imgaine my surprise, later in life, when I looked back upon my baseball and hockey days, only to realize that I was really a left handed person trying to be a righty.

I was a switch hitter in baseball. I could hit right and left. Yet I threw the ball with my right hand.

I kicked the football with my left foot ( a righty would use his right) and hit the hockey puck left handed (I thougjt it was right until corrected).

I don’t remember how the conversation began but, in talking with a friend at work,  I learned from him that in early  times left-handedness was considered almost demonic. Like people who displayed left handed characteristics were possessed.

Society is most certainly right handed.

Being orignally left handed is a part of who I am…a part of my ride. Born lefty only to be turned into a righty.

When my mother told me that bit of information, a lot of things that happened in my life as a youth were clarified.

I remembered learning to write. I had what they called at the time a backward slant. In other words I was writting right as if I were a lefty. Everybody else wrote the “right” way. I remember having an urge to try and write with my left hand. I guess it was my mind telling my body something I didn’t have a clue about intellectually.

Now I am not saying that everything that went wrong in my early days was because I was forced to be a right handed person. Because on the other hand, it would also be possible, if that be true, that everything good that happened and was unique to me was due to that fact as well. It is a goose and gander sort of thing.

What I guess I am saying is that what made me different, or at least feel that way, was the fact that I was cross brained to a degree. We all have probably felt at some point in life that we didn’t quite fit in. That feeling is not neccesarily caused by being left handed in a right dominated society. But maybe it has more to do with things and the way they truned out than I woud suspect.

As I was writting this, I “googled” lefthanded and came up with a whole web society of sorts based on lefty’s who had been turned into righty’s and other things “left”.

So, there is proably more to this thing than meets my eye at this point.

But that’s another ride for another time.