Stapler

Autobiography: stapling and car parts

I just finished reading an article about poor handshakes, which brought me back to a couple of handshaking lessons I was taught when I was kid.

The thing is, Dad’s always had a handshake on the weak side. Anymore, it comes from professional and social habit, but at the bottom line the closest he gets to being the garrulous good ol’ boy is his atypically generous support for a broad interpretation of the Second Amendment (itself complicated).

The point is that when I was a kid, I didn’t know how to shake hands worth a damn.

The first clue toward a different way of shaking hands came from Poppa Joe, who tapped me for some DIY tedium six weeks before my tenth birthday. He was over at the apartment to ask us if I could spend my weekend with them — never a problem since I loved staying over there, and in any event their house was only a few miles away from the apartment. I could’ve walked over there with ease anytime I had an invitation (though at the time I was just getting into the habit of hoofin’ it at length).

The point to the request was to put me to honest work the following day, as my grandmother had leased a new space and was due to move into it in just over a month. Since the merchandise at issue was yarn and thread, the entire south wall of the store was due to be covered in several hundred cubic-foot display boxes — all folded and stapled into shape by hand.

[My mother’s parents are the sort who achieve inner calm by making things with their hands; I take after my parents, for whom writing has been the path to the same result.]

Preparatory to this, Grandpa wanted to know hard I could squeeze, which is a valid question when you’re only nine years old and being called upon to spend an entire Saturday with a heavy-duty stapler in hand.

…So he takes my right hand and tells me to give him the firmest handshake that I can. I comply. He frowns.

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