We attended a dinner party a couple of nights ago and I’ll spare you a long story about why right and left handed actions came up while pouring a glass of wine.
There was only one “leftie” in the group and during the conversation, he said that basically the only thing he did not do left-handed was shovel. Well of course that brought about all sorts of jokes about left-handed and right-handed shovels. But it turns out that he was serious and believed that people are either left- or right-handed shovelers.
I obviously had never given this much thought, but after he explained what he was talking about, it made sense to me. For the sake of discussion, let’s talk about shoveling snow. If you shovel with your right hand near the base of the snow shovel and your left in the D handle, does that make you a right handed shoveler or a left handed shoveler? My friend’s opinion is that if your right hand is at the bottom of the shovel, it makes you a right handed shoveler. If your left hand is at the bottom of the shovel, you are a left handed shoveler.
It turns out that I’m right-handed… I do pretty much everything with my right hand. But when I shovel, my left hand is near the base of the shovel and my right hand is on the D handle. So I guess that makes me a left-handed shoveler… who knew?
I was going to do some of my extensive research on this subject, but I decided I just might open up a can of worms — probably a lot of people would start worrying that they’d been shoveling all wrong over the years. Even though I didn’t get into the extensive research mode, I did give it some thought over a glass of wine. I decided that the reason I shovel the way I do is that your hand near the base of the shovel is just a pivot point — either hand will do. It doesn’t take a lot of extra strength there, it just acts as a pivot. The dominant hand (in my case, the right) wants to do the control. The hand in the D handle is doing the control of the shovel… like the angle of attack, etc. But — again — that’s just my theory. Of course it still doesn’t put to rest the question of whether l’m a left- or right-handed shoveler.
I knew shoveling was hard work, but I hadn’t realized it was so complicated… makes me even “more glad” I got a snow blower….
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