{"id":89711,"date":"2015-09-11T17:30:30","date_gmt":"2015-09-11T21:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89711"},"modified":"2015-09-11T17:33:00","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T21:33:00","slug":"new-tricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/11\/new-tricks\/","title":{"rendered":"New Tricks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From Popular Science<\/i>, 1896.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last November, my brother and I went out with my mother for her birthday dinner. It was a special birthday\u2014she was becoming a senior citizen\u2014so we went somewhere nice, where the waiter told us that it was the start of scallop season and the sweet local bay scallops were a special. My mother ordered them and, after the waiter had left the table, informed us, \u201cI\u2019m going to get my scalloping license this winter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo you\u2019re not,\u201d scoffed my brother. Which is the sort of thing he can get away with, and which in any case was tinged with affection. He and I were thinking of other abandoned schemes: the metal detector, the archery set, the very brief period when our parents walked quarantined dogs at the local shelter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The scallops were good, and I thought no more about it.<\/p>\n

And then this spring, my mother informed me that she and my dad had gotten\u00a0clamming<\/em> licenses and were only waiting to acquire rakes before an orgy of quahog hunting could begin. I told my then fianc\u00e9, who reacted with unexpected excitement.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo way!\u201d he wrote. \u201cAre they transferable? Can we use them? That\u2019s incredible!\u201d<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have the heart to tell him that it would probably come to nothing. After one abortive Christmas-morning attempt to detect a pile of coins we\u2019d placed on the living-room floor directly under the metal detector, we\u2019d retired it to the basement; after failing to find a bunch of hay bales (it was December), we\u2019d never bothered to set up the archery target. My mother had, in any case, developed a late-life clam allergy and couldn\u2019t eat them on pain of violent sickness.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But then she called me yesterday. We were discussing my father\u2019s frighteningly brisk acclimatization to his new smartphone. \u201cHe\u2019s completely addicted,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was painful for him when I locked the phone in the car today, and he was without it until AAA\u00a0arrived. We were clamming,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

I was astounded. \u201cDid you get any?\u201d I said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, yes. And then Dad went home and cooked himself a clam saut\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this was so extraordinarily bizarre that I made her repeat it. My father has never cooked anything, to my knowledge, beyond a saltine topped with a smoked oyster and some barbecue sauce, and it was impossible to imagine his doing so. And yet, she said, he had had to go home for a phone call; he had taken the clams and hitched a ride with a kindly motorist; the motorist had instructed him on the preparation of clams; by the time my mom returned to the house\u2014she had been waiting for AAA\u2014a pan of clams was cooking away. \u201cHe had put in white wine and everything,\u201d she said. \u201cHe had caught and cooked his own dinner!<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had leftover clams,\u201d she continued, \u201cso we went back the next day and released them into the ocean. But when he got home, Dad accidentally ran some hot water onto them first, so I\u2019m not sure what kind of shape they were in. I felt kind of bad; I imagined that they were resigned to their fate, and were going toward the light … and then they\u2019re dumped back into the icy water, and they have to fight for survival. It\u2019s pretty hard, actually.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadie Stein is contributing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review, and the <\/em>Daily\u2019s correspondent.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last November, my brother and I went out with my mother for her birthday dinner. It was a special birthday\u2014she was becoming a senior citizen\u2014so we went somewhere nice, where the waiter told us that it was the start of scallop season and the sweet local bay scallops were a special. My mother ordered them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[8769,19412,19413,11082,14918,12709,8422,8432,17881],"class_list":["post-89711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-aging","tag-clamming","tag-clams","tag-dads","tag-family-life","tag-fatherhood","tag-fishing","tag-parents","tag-seafood"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhen My Parents Got Their Clamming License<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"People are always surprising you.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/11\/new-tricks\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"New Tricks by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 11, 2015 \u2013 Last November, my brother and I went out with my mother for her birthday dinner. 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