The Not-So-Okay Corral

Want to start an argument with an American? Mention guns.

For most Europeans, I may be preaching to the choir. I’m not sure some Americans understand quite how provocative guns are in your own society. It goes to the subject of violence, something taken for granted in large swaths of America: there is it; what can you do?

Yet in the rest of the free world, violence is more shocking, whether terroristic or man vs man, because it happens far less frequently. Disagreements, or even bumping into someone is not a usual cause for bullying or violence outside America. A quick, “Sorry,” is usually sufficient.

I didn’t realize the attitude Europeans had about America until I spent a Christmas in Wales. A friend and I were spending the three-day Christmas holiday at a castle filled with mainly touring Australians and wealthy Brits.

During a lull between Christmas brunch and a seven-course dinner, they had a clay pigeon shoot. While people in the UK don’t generally own hand guns, I thought it nothing unusual to see a clay pigeon shoot with rifles. The hunt, after all, was a thing amongst the very rich, so I have always been led to believe.

I had never before handled a gun of any sort above the level of water pistol or childhood “six-shooter” when playing cowboys and Indians (although what the politically correct term for that is now is anyone’s guess). In fact, I’d only gone outside to watch.

But my friend, who had probably learned to shoot before she learned to ride a bike, talked me into having a go. With no expectation of being able to hit anything, I joined in the friendly competition. I let the gun master – or whatever he’s called – teach this lefty how to shoot a right-handed rifle.

At one point during my turn, I realized that when the clay pigeon disappeared from view (blocked by the rifle), if I pulled the trigger, I actually hit it. I can’t say my, “Wow, I hit it!” was actually joy in shooting. I was more than happy for my turn to be over, despite three hits out of five tries. I’m certain the next contestant was far less skittish about guns.

When I showed surprise at having placed in the top three for women, an English woman commented, “Well, America is a gun culture, isn’t it?”

I was taken aback. Yes, we’re allowed to own guns. I don’t. I wasn’t raised around guns. I didn’t grow up in the wilderness, so, as I see it, I have no need for a gun.

I hate guns. I abhor the sort of violence they engender. I find commercials about the military that extol the virtues of warfare offensive. Thank you for your service, but keep your wars away from me!

This does not mean I would deny you your right to have a gun, provided you can demonstrate you’re neither a terrorist nor mentally ill. But keep it away from me.

The very fact that I would say something like that spurs some of my gun-loving friends and family members to feel threatened to the point of argument.  They often feel the need to try to convince me to like guns, as if they are entitled to their opinions, but I’m not entitled to mine.

I will never be convinced to like guns, to want one or – God forbid – to own one.

My lack of gun ownership in no way compromises the second Amendment.

I do believe the Constitution says Americans have the right to bear arms, not the duty to own them.

Be on your way. Cherish your pistol. I will continue to exercise my right not to bear arms.

As Hawkeye Pierce on M.A.S. H. said:

I will not carry a gun... I'll carry your books, I'll carry a torch, I'll carry a tune, I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even 'hari kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!

Empowerment

I did not grow up in the age of “girl power.” While I was encouraged to do my best in school and found most subjects fairly easy, girls were encouraged to be polite (I excelled), pretty (I failed) and fit in (I failed miserably).

I started high school to the strains of “I am Woman, hear me roar,” but somehow, I didn’t get the memo.

It started in elementary school. I was sent to school in the belief that 1) I would learn to read, and 2) I would make friends.

For the first half of my first year, I waited to learn to read. We recited the alphabet daily, were drilled on phonics and sight words and learned to write them in cursive, but as far as I was concerned, we weren’t reading. Until Christmas, we had no readers. When we finally received them, the stories fell into the category of stupid. I made up better stories, and I was six.

As for friends, I was clueless. I decided to play with the girl who sat in front of me in class, mainly because I knew her name (Debbie). That didn’t last. She had a pushy friend who said Debbie was her friend, and I couldn’t play with them. I learned about crossed games (“You can’t play; the game is crossed.”), playing tag with girls who could run faster than I could, and being told I thought I was a big shot because I usually knew the answers in class. I was told this by those who didn’t.

When I came home in tears because I had no friends, my mother would tell me I didn’t need friends like that. If I mentioned some mean retort I’d thought of saying back to the girls, she would tell me not to stoop to their level.

“Just think how you would feel if someone said that to you.”

But… someone did.

Years of being told that taught me to choke on standing up for myself. I learned enough empathy to spirit away others who were being bullied. I couldn’t stand up to the bullies, but I was friends with their victims until they got tired of me.

People often thought I was a push-over. They were wrong. I simply learned to be passive-aggressive, and wander off. Unfortunately, my lack of ability to stand up to people, and the ingrained admonishment to “be nice” caused me to date several people I didn’t want to date because I didn’t know how to turn them down without hurting their feelings. Fortunately, I knew how to be boring enough to help them decide they didn’t want to date me. They had no worries about hurting feelings.

I remember a nun in seventh grade telling us that people were meant to either get married or go into the religious life. The only reason to remain single was to care for aging parents. Anyone who stayed single for any other reason was selfish. At that, I raised my hand.

“Sister, what if no one ever asks you to marry them?”

My question was met with chuckles by my classmates. I took that to mean that they also understood that it was highly unlikely that anyone would ever ask me. And there was no way I was ever going to be a nun, no matter what.

“Sit down,” she said, as if it were inconceiveable that any woman anywhere could fail to be asked.

The women I see today are so much more confident than I ever was. I see that in teenagers as well.

I’ve attended several bat mitzvahs in my husband’s family, and I’m always amazed at the poise and style of the girl in question and her friends. Of course, they have the advantage of public school, where they are allowed to fraternize with boys, as we were not in my Catholic schools, so they have male friends as well as female ones, and are at ease with all of them.

When I think of myself at 13, I remember a pudgy tomboy who was awkward in every situation that didn’t involve having a guitar in my hands and singing. At 13 I was still very much a child, unlike my nieces and my husband’s cousins. I wouldn’t have fit into the kinds of dresses they wore, much less been able to walk in the heels or dance in said clothes.

Teens and college women are very nonchalant compared to who I was at those ages. I recall several times having people approach me when I was in my first year at Penn State and asking if I’d gone to Catholic school. When I said I had, the response was, “I thought so,” and the stranger with the strange question would walk away.

I don’t to this day understand what that question was about. I thought I was fairly cool in my layered hair, earth shoes, corduroy trousers and blazer over an Oxford shirt. I’d still dress that way, but they don’t make earth shoes like that anymore.

My colleagues at work seem to take all sorts of social situations in stride that I still struggle with. When I listen to them talk about dating, if they’re single, I think I never would have gotten away with talking to guys the way they do. If I’d even looked like I was going to give an ultimatum or make a demand, the guys who dated me would have taken me home, leaving me with no expectation of a call. Ever.

I wonder how people get that way. I was always made to feel that I didn’t have the right to be like other people; I was the outsider.

While I’ve improved with age, I still hate confrontations. I can usually avoid unpleasant situations. And there is something empowering about being happy keeping one’s own company. As the saying goes, “I live in my own little world, but it’s all right: they know me here.”

How Gauche

I’m left-handed. The world was not built for me.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking: good grief, one of those poor, poor, pitiful woe-is-me pieces about how unfair the world is to left-handed people. And you would be wrong. The world might be, but that’s not what this is about.

As a lefty, I tend to notice things. Things that don’t occur to my right-handed counterparts. I suppose it started when, as a child, I started learning to dress myself. Buttons were on the wrong side – although girls clothes do tend to have a left-handed bias for things like zippers and buttons. Learning to tie shoes with a right-handed mother teaching me was a revelation.

We had a plastic bank that was shaped like a shoe at our house. It came complete with a shoelace. The deal was, every time you managed to tie the lace correctly, you received a nickel. Before you laugh, you could actually buy a regular-sized candy bar with a nickel in those days, and the going rate for our tooth fairy was a dime.

My second oldest brother quickly managed to run my mother out of nickels, and he was cut off because he learned to tie his laces so quickly. But when it came to me, my mother despaired of my ever learning.

To be fair, my mother started training us in shoelace tying at age five. As an adult, I learned it’s actually a seven-year-old skill, so I shouldn’t be blamed for being slow on the uptake.

The trouble was, I was being taught to tie right-handed, something I was unable to do. Of course, being wired differently, I think coping strategies came more naturally to me than alternative methods came to my mother. I eventually worked out mirroring what I was being taught, and was able to tie my shoelaces by the time I was five and a half. It just took me a little longer to collect any nickels in the shoe bank.

Scissors were another hurdle. Back when I was in school, there was no such thing as left-handed or ambidextrous scissors. They were right handed. In case you’re wondering, left-handed scissors are hinged in the opposite direction, so that the fingers control the blade closest to them. This is the same way right-handed scissors work for right-handed people. This lends a little more power to the down blade.

Also, “in the olden days,” scissors had handles meant to be held in the right hand, and were slanted that way. That meant that, if you were a lefty and you had to cut more than a straight line, the handles began cutting into your fingers. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that if I turned the scissors upside down, so my fingers were squished into the thumb hole and my thumb was able to slide around in the larger one, I could enjoy pain-free cutting.

When I learned to sew as a teen, I discovered I couldn’t turn sewing scissors upside down because the bottom of the scissors was flat and at an angle to the handles to allow it to ride along a surface while cutting. Turning them upside down actually made it harder to cut. Fortunately for me, left-handed scissors became accessible right about the time I was learning to make my own clothes. They were twice as expensive as the regular kind, but such is the price of being unique.

In my career as a pediatric occupational therapist in schools, teachers often ask me what they can do to help their students cut better. My first question is, are they left or right handed? Most teachers are puzzled by the question. Handedness matters. While right-handed students cut circles in a counterclockwise direction, lefties should cut them in a clockwise direction. The reason for this is, if you’re doing it the opposite way, your hand is in your way, so you can’t properly see the line you’re cutting unless you angle your body in an awkward way. Even when cutting a straight line, the line needs to be on the opposite side of the scissors from the hand.

I learned young to watch people in a mirror if I needed to learn something fine-motor that they were doing. When people are explaining things to me, I often close my eyes, not because I’m trying to shut them out, but because I’m reversing the image in my head to understand it from my perspective.

I play guitar. I can play both left and right handed guitars. As a young teen, I spent hours sitting on my bureau, guitar in hand, playing into the mirror. I was trying to mimic rock star moves. As a consequence, I know what the guitar chords look like from both directions. I have, on occasion, when playing with other guitarists without music in front of us, said, “Just watch what I’m doing and do the reverse.” Right-handed people can rarely do this, and think I’m strange for even suggesting such a thing. I guess they didn’t play rock-star-in-the-mirror as kids. I guess they didn’t have to.

I truly believe that being left-handed gives me an edge when it comes to problem-solving. I never thought I was particularly gifted in this area until a few teachers met some of my suggestions with, “I never would have thought of that!” or with gaping mouths as they looked at me as if I’d just landed on the planet.

Once, after such an experience, I told a teacher, “I tend to think a little outside the box.” Her reply was, “A little?” When I came home and told Blue Scream of Jeff, he said, “You knew there was a box?”

I guess that means lefties are really a little more environmentally friendly. After all, we arrive without the packaging.