Widdershins

When I was a child I had trouble remembering which was my right
and which was my left. This problem stayed with me well into high
school. And beyond. Looking into this trait on Google, I learn that
children who can’t tell right from left often struggle with dyslexia
as well. Which I never did. My mother read me and my sisters
books whenever we asked her to in the evenings, and I credit
that with my avid enjoyment of reading on my own from the
age of eight on up.

I also had trouble tying knots. Specifically, tying my shoelaces.
Before the era of velcro I struggled with my Buster Browns on
Sunday, and my Keds tennis shoes during the week. Mom
always tied my shoes for me when it was time to head out
the door, but if they came undone while I was away from home
and didn’t have a patient school teacher at hand to retie them,
I was forced to wander about with the refrain “You’re gonna trip
over them shoelaces” coming at me from all sides. I was too
embarrassed to ever ask any of my friends to tie them for me --
nonchalantly telling them I left them untied on purpose because I
liked to live dangerously. Sometimes in desperation I’d just do a
basic over and under maneuver on my laces until they looked like
macrame plant holders. But then when I got home I’d have to sit
out on the porch slowly unpicking them, sometimes weeping with
frustration. If I was in a hurry I’d simply rummage for the sewing
scissors mom kept in the drawer of her Singer and slice the
doggone things right off my shoes. But that didn’t go over too
well in our thrifty household.

“Do you know how much shoelaces cost?” mom would cry out
in vexation. “I just hope Woolworths is having a sale on them this
week, young man!”  

I once got on the bus with mom to go over to East Hennepin for
a sports jacket at Eklunds Clothing to look presentable at my
First Communion. We sat by a man redolent of Four Roses
who had not bothered to button up his shirt in the front. He
wore plastic bags on his feet, wrapped with scotch tape. That
seemed like a brilliant way to solve my shoelace problem, but
when I eagerly suggested it to mom she just shook her head and
moved us over a couple of rows. Parents can be so narrow-minded.

It was a happy day for little Timmy when I finally got the hang of
tying a bow all my myself.

But the problem of right and left bedeviled me for many more
years to come. Out on the playground when we formed up teams
for softball during the spring I never knew for certain which way to go
when a high flying ball was popped into the air and my teammates
hollered at me to go left, go left for gosh sakes, to catch it.
I never caught it. This made me something of a pariah when
it came to choosing up sides. That, and the dangerous habit
I had of swinging wildly at every pitch thrown to me when I was
at bat; I often connected with the catcher’s shoulder or an unwary
bystander’s kneecap.

When I got into my high school theater class and began appearing
onstage in extracurricular plays, I often had to be physically pushed
in the proper direction when it came to walking stage right or exiting
stage left, until finally I took to labeling the white rubber tips of my Keds
with an R and an L. That helped somewhat, plus it also labeled me
irreversibly as one of the school’s outstanding eccentrics.  

When I joined Ringling Brothers as a First of May clown in 1971
I frequently caught hell from the show choreographer Richard
Barstow during rehearsals in Winter Quarters because I seemed
to be flouting his directives to have the clowns turn right or sashay
left during the big production numbers.

“Stop! Stop! Who is that boy? You, boy. Are you a complete idiot?”
he’d scream into his microphone whenever I fouled up the simple dance
routines he drilled us in. “I want him fired! Get him off the lot, right now!
Hand him a shovel and put him behind the elephants or something. Only
get him out of my sight!” Charlie Baumann, the stern Teutonic
Performance Director, would pull me out of the chorus line and whisper
to me to go sit down on the bleachers until Herr Direktor had cooled
down a bit -- showing me an unexpected kindness that belied his
normally ferocious demeanor. Steve Smith, my future partner
when we worked together as advance clowns for the circus,
took pity on me and usually managed to stand next to me during
the dance rehearsals, whispering frantically to me to “turn this way,
Tork, this way!” to avert the missish wrath of Barstow.

By the time I was called to go to Thailand as an LDS missionary
in my twenty-second year I had pretty much figured out the right
and left situation. I only had to hesitate a second or two before
heading in the correct direction. But then, learning the Thai for ‘right’
and ‘left’ put me over a barrel once again.

To go right is pronounced, in Thai, “khwa mur.” To go to the left,
“sai mur.” When not riding bikes or taking the bus, we often waved
down a three wheeled pedicab to take us to proselytizing
appointments. But darned if I could ever remember how to tell
the driver to turn left at the corner or stop at the noodle shop
on the right. So we overshot our destination nine times out of ten,
making us late. But then again, being Thailand, nobody ever
seemed to mind if we showed up twenty minutes past the time.

Today, I am happy to report, I only wear shoes with velcro.
And in my own native tongue I am perfectly secure in always
going in the right direction. But don’t get me started on clockwise
and widdershins . . .