I replayed in my mind what he had said, certain I had somehow heard it wrong. “You’re . . . kidding me, right?”

Then he reached under his bed and pulled out a box. Inside were little plastic zipper bags—at least a hundred of them—and in each one there was . . . yes, you guessed it, a paper clip. Little ones, big ones, those fat black ones that hold whole stacks of paper together.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

I just stared, dumbfounded. “Exactly when did they release you from the nuthouse, Schwa?”

He reached into the box and pulled out a little baggie that held a silver clip. “This clip held together pages of the Nuclear Arms Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev.”

“No way.”

I looked at it closely. It looked just like an ordinary paper clip.

He pulled out another one. It was tarnished bronze. “This one held together the original lyric sheets of ‘Hey Jude.’” He pulled out another one with a blue plastic coating. “This one was clipped to a mission manual for the space shuttle.”

“You mean it’s been in space?”

The Schwa nodded.

“Wow!”

He showed me clip after clip, each one more exciting than the last. “Where did you get them?”

“I wrote to famous people, asking them for a paper clip from something important. You’d be amazed how many of them wrote back.”

It was genius! Most of the time people are looking for the letters and documents and people that make history, but no one thinks about the little things that hold history together. Leave it to the Schwa to think of such a thing. It was, at the same time, the dullest and most interesting collection I had ever seen in my life.

Dinner wasn’t ready until after nine, and it was the second worst chicken I’d ever tasted, beaten only by a dish at a friend’s birthday party that tasted more like it was made from the piñata. Even so, I was glad I had dinner with the Schwa and his father, who continued to play guitar during the meal, greasy chicken fingers and all.

“It’s like he doesn’t have a care in the world,” I commented to the Schwa while his dad did the dishes.

“Yeah, brain damage’ll do that to you,” the Schwa said as he went to rewash the dishes his father didn’t quite get clean. “But I wouldn’t advise it.”