Left, Left, Left, Left, Left, Left, Left and Left

By Dan Rattiner

It's been so damn cold. I woke up yesterday morning and it was 12 degrees and with the wind blowing in across Three Mile Harbor, five below with the wind chill.

I was alone in the house, my wife was in New York City, and I dressed to go off to work at the paper in Bridgehampton. But there was a problem. In my heavy coat, the one I had worn the day before, there was only one glove, the left one. This was bad. It gets colder. This was my last pair of gloves. Now I only have one glove. Where could the right glove be?

I figured it could turn up. But it was not good that this was a left. I had gone off the day before with this pair of fur-lined gloves, and two other black gloves, which I thought could be backup gloves, but which turned out to be lefts. Now I had three left gloves. And it was bitter cold out.

There is a place on the floor in the front hall closet of our house where we have a plastic container that sometimes contains scarves and gloves. I'd seen black gloves in there, so I squatted down, opened the box and went through it. I found five more black gloves. A jackpot of them. All lefts.

The cleaning lady came in at this point. She asked me what I was doing there squatting in front of the closet and I told her I was looking for gloves and asked if she had seen any. She said she had put all she found in the container.

I stood up. I was holding eight left gloves. I walked them into the kitchen and set them all in a row on the kitchen counter. Some were knitted, some leather, some were lightweight and some were fur-lined. None of them matched. And none were rights.

She started laughing. "I'll look around," she said.

While I got my stuff together and got my coat on, she was here and there. I could hear drawers opening and closing.

"Nothing," she said to me at the front door.

"Maybe you could cut off the thumbs of four of them and stitch them on the other side," I said.

She laughed some more. I laughed. I had my hands in my pockets.

I did try putting the most wiggily of the knitted lefts on my right hand. It was close, but I thought it was just too uncomfortable. I took it off.

"Take them all with you," she said. "Maybe you'll find some rights at work."

I went to work. No gloves. In the afternoon, I went to Kmart in the shopping center there and found they did not have gloves anymore. They are looking to sell clothes for springtime. As I was driving out of the mall, I saw all the used clothes bins for the poor from St. Anthony all lined up next to the police station annex behind the Gap. There were eight clothes bins. It's a big business.

I thought, I should put one left glove in each bin as some sort of sick joke, but then I thought it would be an even better sick joke if I put all eight lefts in one bin.

It would be at a church on another cold day and all these poor people would be lined up, and they'd take out these eight gloves and be so excited and then they'd see they were all lefts and boy, would they be pissed.

Why are only the rights lost? Maybe it's how you take your gloves off. Most of us are righties. We take off our right gloves first, put it in a safe place, think, "Now my gloves are safe," then take off the left and bingo, we forget to put it with the other.

Back at the office, on a shelf above the fax machine, I found a right. This is a dream, I thought. I should kick myself to see if I am still awake.

It's like a gift from God. Did it match any of the others? No. But it was close.

It turned sunny around four and the temperature got up into the twenties. I went down to the beach and ran around at sunset. My hands were toasty warm, each one inside a proper glove. It was wonderful.ent home and went to bed, carefully putting both gloves on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in the bedroom. This morning, the right is gone again.

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