Member-only story
The Familect: Hold The Grip
Hello, boomer or Gen X, do you remember the indoor TV antenna in the old days. Yes, the cute rabbit ears. And the exercises we did to them to capture the signals? From swinging the ears like crazy to hanging the weird stuff on them.
My two brothers and I grew up in the golden age of Kung Fu TV shows. Every night the action scenes were a big joy for us every night. Meanwhile, the bad signals were a pain in the axx……eyes. You never know when the Kung Fu turned into the zombie moves. We hung a whole bunch of stuff on the antenna, too, from the plastic, cloth, to the books. Finally, an empty Coca CAN did the trick. Hanging it through the pull-tab hole, boom, the image just came back.
But still the signal often got lost. Then we found that if we held the can with one hand and kept the grip, the image would come back stable and clear. So here is the deal, whenever a big show was on, one of us would stand there and hold the can all the time. Over time, “Hold the grip” became our familect — the code words in the family. “You want to see the show? Let’s hold the grip.”
We all loved our little brother Sam. On most of the Kung Fu TV nights, we held the can for him. He might think that his brothers would “hold the grip” for him forever. Decades later…
