We had clams for dinner tonight. To be precise, we had 24 oysters, 24 mussels, two pounds of shrimp, two pounds of scallops and 150 clams for dinner (okay, 146 if you leave out the four that didn’t open). You’re thinking we must have had a crowd over to eat such vast quantities, huh? Nope, just me, Chuck, Chuck’s sister Dina, her husband Kenny and their cousin Jackie and her husband Jimmy. We had such vast quantities because Dina claimed she could eat “dozens of clams” all by herself. And we believed her. She crapped out at around one dozen. She claimed that she had eaten a bunch of the clams and mussels as they were cooking. We didn’t swallow that for a second (pun intended). She will now forever be known as the “clam coward” – the one who, when faced with the last clam, backed down from the challenge, couldn’t cross the finish line, dropped the ball in the end zone, insert your own sports euphamism here, generally pussed out.

The rest of us soldiered on, finishing all of the clams and the mussels, the shrimp and a good portion of the scallops. Chuck bravely took it upon himself to almost single-handedly finished off the oysters. Indigestion: it’s not just a river in Egypt.

The real treat of the day happened earlier when we went to visit Chuck and Dina’s 91-year-old Aunt Jo. She and their mother grew up together, and she is sharp as a tack and full of wonderful stories. She remembers Chuck with special fondness as she spent a good part of the first year of his life as a sort of fill-in mom to him as his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis when Chuck was two months old and sent to a sanatarium. After all these years, she still thinks of him as her little Charlie. I took the photo you see here at the end of the visit.