The Smiling Clam Meets the Tiny Finger

My father always had an incredible sense of humor. None of us were sure how he developed this as his own parents were a somber pair and had the outward appearance of those people that you see in 19th century photographs staring out as though they see the guillotine about to come down on their necks. Somehow he was able to overcome this limitation and develop his own wry view of the world which never ceased to surprise.

We lived in a beach town and he loved the beach so we went almost every day during the summer months. And it was on this beach that I had my very first encounter with a clam. Late one summer afternoon, after hours of building sandcastles and swimming with both my brother and friends I happened upon a clam. This was not any old clam, the usual sort where the poor thing had been picked clean by seagulls and lay as one half of it's former glorious self. No, this was the entire bivalve, open about 1/4 and gurgling inside. I detected a pink fleshy part sticking out and ran over to my father to show him what I had discovered.

He came back with my brother and upon seeing this clam he said, "it's perfectly fine, he is saying hello to you and you should put a finger in to say hello to him." On an instinctual level that seemed unwise but I figured that it was the thing to do, so in went my finger.

I only remember a lot of screaming and running around as my father chased me around the beach. The clam had snapped shut like a vice around my finger and held on so tightly that I thought it was going to bite it off. I experienced excruciating pain and started to run with this clam attached to my tiny digit as my father chased me in circles. When he couldn't catch me, a friend of his joined the chase and they finally cornered me and held me down while my father smashed the clam against the rocks. To put it mildly, that was the last time I ever went near a clamshell.

It was about a year later that we were back on the same beach playing and swimming when the lifeguards started to blow their whistles and waving in that way that told us all to get out of the ocean. So out we went. While there were regular "no swim" times due to weather, jellyfish infestations or other natural phenomenon, this time we were mystified.

The adults all stood at the water's edge in that adult way they were so fond of while we kids huddled behind, all surveying the horizon. My father finally walked up to the beach chief (yes there was such a thing) and asked him what was going on. He replied that there had been some shark sightings in the ocean and he believed that one had been beached right over there, pointing in the direction of a circle of lifeguards.

We all walked over and pushed our way into the inner circle hoping to steal a glance and there it was. A baby white shark, still alive but barely breathing, its mouth opening and closing slightly to reveal a row of steely teeth. It was a marvelous thing to behold, this creation of nature, and I as looked around the circle I caught my father's eye and he smiled. I glared back and silently said with my eyes, "don't even think about it." And that was the end of that. We never spoke of clams or sharks again.