A perfunctory gesture? Hardly. It defines you. It defines the exchange. A hands-on study of a subtle craft.
THE HAND IS AN INTIMATE BODY PART. Its very shape and condition tell a lot about who you are. I've always hated my hands. They're meaty and fat, the very definition of a paw. In college I worked several jobs--cleaning dumpsters, pitchforking rocks out of a freshly tilled soccer field, carrying ten-gallon buckets of hot pitch across the roof of a large shopping mall--that built up a very nice, very manly set of calluses. My father used to check them by shaking my hand from time to time. He liked it when they were nasty rough, though his were always ultrasmooth. To him, this seemed to define the gap between us. I was a kid who worked his vacations because he needed the money; he was a boss who skipped his by choice.