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Ligature of infancy, healing engine of emergency, base and
mainstay of our civilization--we celebrate the safety pin.
What would we do without safety pins? Is it not odd to think,
looking about us on our fellowmen (bearded realtors, ejaculating
poets, plump and ruddy policemen, even the cheerful dusky
creature who runs the elevator and whistles "Oh, What a Pal Was
Mary" as the clock draws near 6 P. M.)--all these were first
housed and swaddled and made seemly with a paper of safety pins.
How is it that the inventor who first conferred this great gift
on the world is not known by name for the admiration and applause
of posterity? Was it not the safety pin that made the world safe
for infancy?
There will be some, mayhap, to set up the button as rival to the
safety pin in service to humanity. But our homage bends toward
the former. Not only was it our shield and buckler when we were
too puny and impish to help ourselves, but it is also (now we are
parent) symbol of many a hard-fought field, where we have
campaigned all over the white counterpane of a large bed to
establish an urchin in his proper gear, while he kicked and
scrambled, witless of our dismay. It is fortunate, pardee, that
human memory does not extend backward to the safety pin
era--happily the recording carbon sheet of the mind is not
inserted on the roller of experience until after the singular
humiliations of earliest childhood have passed. Otherwise our
first recollection would doubtless be of the grimly flushed large
face of a resolute parent, bending hotly downward in effort to
make both ends meet while we wambled and waggled in innocent,
maddening sport. In those days when life was (as George Herbert
puts it) "assorted sorrows, anguish of all sizes," the safety pin
was the only thing that raised us above the bandar-log. No wonder
the antique schoolmen used to enjoy computing the number of
angels that might dance on the point of a pin. But only
archangels would be worthy to pirouette on a safety pin, which is
indeed mightier than the sword. When Adam delved and Eve did
spin, what did they do for a safety pin?
Great is the stride when an infant passes from the safety pin
period to the age of buttons. There are three ages of human
beings in this matter: (1) Safety pins, (2) Buttons, (3) Studs,
or (for females) Hooks and Eyes. Now there is an interim in the
life of man when he passes away from safety pins, and, for a
season, knows them not--save as mere convenience in case of
breakdown. He thinks of them, in his antic bachelor years, as
merely the wrecking train of the sartorial system, a casual
conjunction for pyjamas, or an impromptu hoist for small clothes.
Ah! with humility and gratitude he greets them again later,
seeing them at their true worth, the symbol of integration for
the whole social fabric. Women, with their intuitive wisdom, are
more subtle in this subject. They never wholly outgrow safety
pins, and though they love to ornament them with jewellery,
precious metal, and enamels, they are naught but safety pins
after all. Some ingenious philosopher could write a full tractate
on woman in her relation to pins--hairpins, clothes pins, rolling
pins, hatpins.
Only a bachelor, as we have implied, scoffs at pins. Hamlet
remarked, after seeing the ghost, and not having any Sir Oliver
Lodge handy to reassure him, that he did not value his life at a
pin's fee. Pope, we believe, coined the contemptuous phrase, "I
care not a pin." The pin has never been done justice in the
world of poetry. As one might say, the pin has had no Pindar. Of
course there is the old saw about see a pin and pick it up, all
the day you'll have good luck. This couplet, barbarous as it is
in its false rhyme, points (as Mother Goose generally does) to a
profound truth. When you see a pin, you must pick it up. In other
words, it is on the floor, where pins generally are. Their
instinctive affinity for terra firma makes one wonder why they,
rather than the apple, did not suggest the law of gravitation to
someone long before Newton.
Incidentally, of course, the reason why Adam and Eve were
forbidden to pick the apple was that it was supposed to stay on
the tree until it fell, and Adam would then have had the credit
of spotting the principle of gravitation.
Much more might be said about pins, touching upon their curious
capacity for disappearing, superstitions concerning them,
usefulness of hatpins or hairpins as pipe-cleaners, usefulness of
pins to schoolboys, both when bent for fishing and when filed to
an extra point for use on the boy in the seat in front (honouring
him in the breech, as Hamlet would have said) and their curious
habits of turning up in unexpected places, undoubtedly caught by
pins in their long association with the lovelier sex. But of
these useful hyphens of raiment we will merely conclude by saying
that those interested in the pin industry will probably emigrate
to England, for we learn from the Encyclopaedia Britannica that in
that happy island pins are cleaned by being boiled in weak beer.
Let it not be forgotten, however, that of all kinds, the safety
is the King Pin.