Old Customers

We had a full house at the boat landing this past week-end. The lowest tides of the year, some as low as a minus two foot ran during the week and that resulted in a lot of clammers and abalone divers visiting us. We were real busy in the boathouse renting boats and getting boats launched and tackle sold.

A lady came in to launch her boat and buy fishing licenses with her extended family. We only see her once a year for the low tides. She's been coming close to thirty years and though her face is familiar and I know she only comes once a year, I cannot remember her name. This lady is distinguished in that we'd come to know her as a pain-in-the-ass sort of customer. She would always show up for her boat rental on a busy low tide Saturday. She dithered around with obtaining licenses and copious quantities of saltwater taffy and never had her paperwork in order. It would invariably take us twice as long to take care of her compared to our other customers. Kerry and Pam and I usually tried to pawn this customer off on the other guy as we didn't want to be bothered with her.

This year, our customer had the look of the Cancer Ladies. You're surely familiar with the Look: a little cloche hat or tight scarf tied to their hairless head accompanied by that weary look of too much pain. She was also moving with a cane, quite slowly and looked to be consumed by the disease. But she was stalwartly trying to present a sunny side up disposition to her family. (I have no idea how she fared getting into and out of the boat on the clam beds and moving around on the mud flats with that cane.) She intoned to Pam that this year would be her last. We took it to mean that her cancer was terminal not just that maybe she'd had enough of clam digging after thirty years.

She got her paperwork done eventually and filled her pockets with two bags of taffy which they would consume on the clam beds. But then we proceeded to wait for her son. We always waited for her son. He was always the last to come into the boathouse and would need to fill out his fishing license. It'd been this way ever since he'd turned sixteen and needed a license. He had to be somewhere in his thirties now. He was a fat, selfish young man, thoroughly involved in his own activities. I never saw him pay much attention to his attentive mother. Over the thirty something years we knew her, she doted on him. There was nothing wrong with this fat, greedy boy in her book. When he finally showed up this year, still late, of course, I was a bit gratified to see that he was a bit less fixated on himself and allowed his mother a wee bit of attention, since it would be her last year clam digging.

They departed for the clam beds and I felt depressed. This surely, would be the last time we'd see her and I couldn't even remember her name. It's not like we don't see our old customers die each year. The older we get, the more names we collect each year. It used to be maybe three to five a year we'd lose, now, it's more like one or two dozen! And it depresses me to know they'll just be names we conjure up in our conversations about "The Old Days" and we won't see them anymore. But I guess that's the way it has to be after running this business for fifty one years. Sometimes I think we'll have a bigger crowd of spirits on the Other Side enjoying our area in ghostly form than the physical bodies actually coming out to enjoy. What a crowd we have building!