Our Week in Hawaii (funniest part)

Funniest Hawaiian moment so far. We're in the grocery store to stock up our little pantry, and come across the frozen meat section. There sits this football sized plastic bag and I see, after a second, that it's a full octopus, legs and all: about 3 pounds for $20. This is unusual, yes, and I point it out to Rita. She hoists the thing and wants to go get the camera. But the bag is actually quite frost-lined, indicating it's been there for a longish while, and the picture probably wouldn't come out. By the looks of it, even here the whole octopus is not a big seller.

Rita is ready to head into the breakfast cereal aisle, but I say HOLD ON; I want to see WHAT ELSE is for sale in THIS section. Gawd knows what strange foods we might find: starfish? anemone? shark fin? flounder?

So we work our way down, right to left, until we get to a section with yellow styro-packs with cellophane (like you see with ground beef in your average Midwest grocery). These, however, contain "Fresh Manilla Clams": with about a dozen full clam shells, each about the size of a silver dollar (the old ones, not the new Sacajawaens), but more ovoid than rounded. A few of these clams have their jaws slightly spread and you can see a little white meat poking out.

I say, "Hey, look at this", and Rita turns her head, just as I touch the package with my forefinger, just as the white meat, in the clam I've poked, recoils from my touch. Rita lets out a yelp and hops about six inches back. There's a Hawaiian-looking stock boy just a few feet to our left, who's loading stuff from a cart into the next shelf. He hears Rita, and turns to look.

I say to him, "is it normal to sell these like this", and I touch the next clam in the pack, which also flinches. Which causes Rita to give another little yelp-and-a-hop. And he looks at us, puzzled, and says, "That's how you know they're fresh".

I say, "Oh, okay -- well, we're not from around here". And he turns back to his work, I'm sure convinced we're a pair of idiots and says, "Yeah, they just came in today".

We walked away to buy cereal, and Rita STILL looks like she's swallowed a live caterpillar. And I say, "I guess I really didn't have to tell him. He KNOWS we're not from around here".

POSTSCRIPT

Three days later we we're in the same store, looking to buy some "Surfah" flip-flops, but willing to settle for "Local" brand. We find the shoes, and head out of the store, but I stop and detour, with morbid fascination, to see how the "Fresh Manilla Clams" are holding up.

They're still there, two of the six packages we saw, but the clams are no longer so frisky as before. They look shrunken, emaciated, dehydrated, and deceased. I poke one, to confirm my visual suspicion, and they no longer flinch at my touch. They have passed on, no longer "fresh" Manilla Clams; or not as "fresh" as before, but still for sale.