My oldest brother Jim, who unfortunately passed several years ago, was pretty much ambidextrous.
He wasn’t born that way, but he was clearly left-handed before he began school.
But, like me, he was sent to Catholic school (all public schools in Newfoundland were either Catholic or Protestant in those days) and the nuns who taught there had no time for left handers like Jim.
That’s because a lot of religious folk thought left-handed people were evil and spawns of the devil who were likely criminal and dangerous.
It should be said that my brother Jim was no angel and always seemed to manage to get himself in heaps of trouble all through his life (including burying my mother’s wedding ring in the backyard while playing treasure hunter when he was a toddler and the ring was never found again), but he was certainly not an evil person.
But, for thousands of years, Satan has been associated with the left hand in various ways and he is normally portrayed as being left-handed in pictures and other images in those long ago times.
So the nuns were determined to exorcise my brother of the demons that were obviously working through him and his left hand.
They forced Jim to write with his right hand and use it as his dominant appendage for doing other activities, but when Jim continued to use his left hand when the nuns weren’t looking, they took to tying his left hand behind his back so he couldn’t use it and had to utilize his right hand for writing and other tasks.
I can’t imagine how this practice would go over in classrooms these days, but I’m guessing that it would likely be frowned upon.
In fact, I suspect the nuns would have lost their teaching licences and probably face criminal charges, but those were certainly different times.
After being forced into it, and I’m sure with the fear of his soul spending eternity in hell if he continued using his left hand after the nuns drilled that notion into him, Jim did start writing with his right hand and actually became pretty efficient at it.
But they couldn’t break him of using his left hand as his dominant one for other tasks, much to the chagrin of the nuns, but as Jim was writing with his right hand, they finally accepted that they had done all they could to save his soul and stopped tying his left hand behind his back during the school days.
Until the day he died, Jim wrote with his right hand and did everything else with his left hand and I remember people picking up on that and Jim was often asked as to why that was.
They were amazed when he explained, and I always had the feeling that many thought he was telling them a tall tale.
I don’t know how he ever trained himself to write legibly with his right hand.
I once broke three of my middle fingers on my right hand when I was 13 years old after tripping on the leg of a camper as I hustled through one of my neighbours' backyards on my way home one night.
My hand was heavily bandaged for several weeks, and when I went back to school after the accident, I assumed that I could just sit back, relax and stare out the window as I couldn’t participate fully in the classroom activities.
But, like Jim but for other reasons, my teachers told me to get used to writing with my left hand until my fingers healed.
That was a great idea in theory, but my right hand is by far my dominant one and my left one is little more than a claw whose only function is to support my right hand.
So my writing was pretty much indecipherable scrawls until my fingers healed, and the teachers had to settle for giving me tests orally until that happened.
I could only imagine the hell and torment Jim must have gone through while I was attempting to write with my left hand.
But, unlike me, he mastered it and I think that says a lot about how determined he could be.
