William Least Heat-Moon decided to take a long walk one day: across the United States. His epic journey is wonderful reading, especially in bed on a cold winter's night, while you're quiet and warm and tucked in just so.

He found out much that was new and strange to him: one thing that struck him and made him think was repeatedly finding one shoe as he made his way across the country. Where was the other shoe? Why would someone throw one shoe out the car window? What good was the other one, alone? He finally concluded, without much conviction, that all those solitary shoes were the result of people dangling their feet out the window, with one shoe accidentally flying off and out onto the roadside.

In the Talk of the Town section of the January 19 New Yorker magazine, there's a nice piece about a psychologist in New York City whose specialty is finding solitary lost or abandoned gloves. She classifies them as to type, size, and handedness, and then writes articles and papers about what it all means.

Her conclusion is that people lose one glove when they're multi-tasking, and it slips away unnoticed. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that most of the gloves she finds are right-hand ones; this means, she says, that the mostly right-hand dominant glove losers took off that one to do whatever it is they needed more dexterity to do.