Ambidextrous: when the left hand knows what the right hand does

There are right-handed humans and left-handed humans, and then there those who are equally adept in the use of both left and right.  Wikipedia says "People that are naturally ambidextrous are uncommon, with only one out of one hundred people being naturally ambidextrous."

Imagine a child using a standard pair of scissors with its left hand in a craft project, switching a saw from right to left and back, pasting, gluing and finally putting on finishing touches of color. Every once in a while, the older or younger sibling working on the same project will hand over a piece of thin plywood and ask for help.

The supervising grandmother looks on and never comments.

It is natural and unremarkable to the child: that's how things are done.

The fact that the sibling cannot guide the saw smoothly around the left side curves of the clown figure you are making has no meaning other than you feeling good you can help.

As the child gets older and begins to write, first with a pencil then a pen, the adults tell it to use the right hand, and the child complies. For the next ten or so years, writing is the only activity performed exclusively with the right hand.

Other manual activities are performed with either hand, without ever thinking about or hearing about a "normal" way of doing something.

Manually sawing fire wood or chopping wood is vastly more productive when you can simply switch hands if you get tired. Work with that side until you get tired, switch, continue until that arm is starting to feel sore, switch back, and so on.

Threading a needle from the left can make the difference between frustration and satisfaction.

A game of table tennis with either your left or your right is not only fun, the teen notices. Best of all, you can totally upset the game of your opponent when the bat is in one hand on the way out and in the other as the opponent lobs the ball back to you.

Yet, even as you notice that you can do things differently, it still remains utterly, blandly, normal.

As time passes, life gets busy, you forget about being ambidextrous not long after you learned the word in school. At the same time, creating things with your hands becomes rare.

More than a decade later, when talking about the first nephew getting ready to go to kindergarten, your mother lets slip that her parents trained her to use her right hand instead of her left.

You feel a little sad for her on the drive home.

Then you realize that you are steering the car with only your left hand.

And you smile.