Enjoying the little neckers

For dinner tonight: Clams, olive loaf, corn on the cob, squash, black beans, and rice. I love razor clams. I hate digging clams. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I hate sand, actually. It hurts. It gets in all the cracks and crevices of your body and takes forever to wash out. It gets in your teeth and between your toes and everywhere in between! Crunch, crunch, crunch, sand in the teeth. Yuck!

When I had had enough of my first marriage and packed my children and my bags and left I went on food stamps. I was the first person in the history of my family to "go on" food stamps. Not a crowning moment. My grandfather decided to help me "go off" food stamps. "Honey, whenever we needed food we would go clam digging. Why don't you just go clam digging?" "The season's not open, " I would reply. "Honey, it will be okay, if someone stops you you just tell them your getting off the public dole, they'll understand." I didn't think they would so I wouldn't go when the season wasn't open. Then came the battle when the season was open!

"Honey, lets you and me go clam digging." "That's okay grandpa, we'll be okay." "You'll feel better about yourself if your not on the public dole, honey, lets get some clams." Why was I fighting him now? Because he didn't think going over the limit was that big of a deal when you had hungry mouths to feed. My aunt had four mouths to feed, I had two, my uncle had three and grandpa would reason that was four adults, including him, whose limit we could dig. The problem was they weren't with us. He would say, "Oh honey, the ranger's a reasonable man, he's only after the crook. If he stops us we just tell him what we're doing and he'll understand. He's looking for the poacher, not us. " Um, you want to get clams out of season and you want to get more clams than we are supposed to, um, we are the poachers. But no, no we weren't and nothing I could say would convince him otherwise. I rarely went clam digging with him, the pressure was too great and I knew the rest of the family would blame whoever was caught with him, although now that I am older I think I would have just handled it different. I would have just made sure I had the limit in my bag and let him put all the overlimit into his bag. Then, if we had been stopped I would let my grandfather talk to the man for about an hour as HIS punishment for having stopped us.

I swear, one time my grandfather went through a stop sign in front of a cop and when the cop saw who was driving he just nodded and waved. "That's too bad he didn't stop me for something," grandpa remarked, "I didn't get to finish telling him about how we used to have fill out reports when we brought abandoned boats in that had been stuck on the sand bars. Triplicates, and it was a royal pain in the you-know-what if you made a mistake because you can't scratch it out, it has to be a clean sheet of government issue paper, which if you wasted you had to fill out another form informing someone of why you were using so much paper ..."

One day my grandfather launched into, "Honey, you'll feel better if your not on the government dole," speech and I had had it. "Why don't you get off the dole if its so bad being on it?" I asked, hotly. "What are you talking about?" came the retort. "Your darling Limbaugh was saying how no one should be taking a hand out of Social Security. Why don't you "get off" that?" "I earned that!" he grouchily said. "Grandpa, you have been retired for 20 years. You are making more in retirement than you did when you were working! You are on government 'dole'!" At the time he was collecting two retirements plus social security. He was coast guard twenty years then he went to work for the school district as a custodian and worked another 20 years. He had health insurance from Tri-Med and VA, as well as Medicare. He literally was making almost three times what he had when he was working, even given cost of living increase. He muttered again, "I earned that!" I replied, "I don't deny that, but I've been working since I was fourteen and I've never been on unemployment insurance. After all of these years, I am looking at these food stamps as my "insurance," I earned them. Now, can we never talk about "dole" again?" "Sure thing, honey, or Rush Limbaugh either."