Selling Sea Shells: A Narrative Conchology
Ronald J. Pelias
The Set-up
I walk along the sea shore. Sea shell after sea shell presents itself, makes itself available for my selection, for my predilection to infuse it with meaning. Some carry a trace of their former connections; some do not. Among the many before me, one catches my eye and I bend my body down to lift it from its sandy bedding. It’s a spiral conch shell, only a little over an inch in length, pale white, with symmetrical, rust-colored lines running from its top to mid-way down its narrowing form. It looks perfectly shaped, but when I rinse the sand away in the water, I notice a small chip near its tail end. I hold it next to my ear; I hear nothing. I see no signs of its former use.
As I write this description, I am trying to sell you this sea shell I found on the sea shore, trying to invest it with significance, not only as something of value in the world in and of itself, but as something that has acted upon me, made me into the person who selected a particular sea shell and who is trying to convince you that this piece that starts with the sea shell I found on the sea shore is worth your attention. I’m planning to take you with me through layers of calcium carbonate. I want you to buy what I’m selling.
The Selling Points
1.
A woman, let’s call her Sadie, sells sea shells on the sea shore from a small shed on a sandy beach in Jamaica. Shells of all sizes and shapes hang from the shed’s roof. Their colors slide against the blue sky in the steady wind. On the shelf secured to the bottom half of a door facing the ocean is a simple glass case with shells, special shells, some Sadie made into earrings which she tries to sell for $10, but often she will take less. There, in that shed with her sea shells, she sits, sheltered from the daily sun and forgotten by the man who left her with their three small children with the wave of his hand and with five small words, “All this. It’s too much” before he disappeared like a wave returning to the sea. Few seem to stop where Sadie sells her sea shells, except for those who seek bottled water. When no one is there, Sadie sings songs she learned in church, hoping the wind will carry her words to the ears of Jesus and He will smile down upon her, this woman named Sadie who sells sea shells on the sea shore.
2.
Ms. Applegate, a third-grade teacher who teaches at a small rural school in Kansas, is a firm believer in using the arts to teach topics she is required to cover. Faced with teaching a science unit on life on our planet, she decided that she would call upon a strategy she used before: she will have her students work with shells to make various animals while she talks about exoskeletal creatures. She will show them how to paint a panda bear and a fox on a shell, how to make a shell into a turtle, and how to create little people with shell shirts and hats. She quickly found online outlets where she could buy some colorful shells of various types to show her students and some plain white ones they could use for their craft projects, all for under $15.00. After her purchase and a little research, she felt set.
As her lesson plan was unfolding, Ms. Applegate thought all was working well. She had explained how to do the craft projects and had gotten the students started. While they were working, she let them listen to the ocean in her large conch shell she still had from her childhood visit with her parents to St. Petersburg, and she had the students repeat in unison the name of a few of the colorful shells she brought. She started talking about how shells are like houses for some creatures and how sometimes a different creature might live in another’s house after it is no longer being used. As she was developing her house metaphor, she noticed Myra had turned herself into a small ball in her chair, tears running down her face. Ms. Applegate told the class to keep working on their projects. She slowly approached Myra and knelt down beside her desk. “What’s wrong, Myra?”
“I don’t think we should be using their houses. I don’t think we should be painting their bones.”
“Oh, Myra. I’m sorry this is upsetting you. You can just draw an animal, maybe a turtle or maybe some other creature that lives in the sea, on a piece of paper you if wish.” Myra nodded and reached into her desk for some paper.
Class continued, but Ms. Applegate couldn’t get Myra’s remark out of her head. That night Ms. Applegate was still trying to calculate the cost of her lesson.
3.
Standing on the beach, I remember an old poem I wrote about a relationship that never found its footing, like how, after a short time, your feet sink when standing in wet sand and you can’t keep your balance.
Stone, Shell, Feather
On the beach,
a stone,
brick red,
the size of my palm,
smooth as the skin
I cannot touch.
It anchors my hand.
Its weight--
and over, of one
feather more.
A shell,
once perfect,
now chipped, cracked,
spotted with the color
of the stone, empty.
On its underside,
barely visible,
a mark of connection
to its other half.
I carry it.
A feather,
wet, lost to the gull
that flies
against the red sky,
against the wind,
shudders,
then banks away.
It lands, settling
on one thin leg
in its nest,
thinking, over
and over, of one
feather more.
Standing there, thinking about this poem, sand crabs gather around my feet. I feel myself sinking, feel the cost of memory.
4.
I work in an oyster bar, shucking oysters day in and day out. Can’t tell you how many times I cut myself, either with the shell or with a slip of the knife. When I first started, I’d cut myself all the time. Now, I got my tricks, but still sometimes when I’m rushing to get a bunch of orders out, I’ll get myself. You can’t serve an oyster with your blood in its shell. All in all though, it’s not bad work. Once you get the hang of it, it gets pretty routine. I just wish they would pay a bit more. I mean, think of the risk I take. I know a couple of guys who cut themselves so bad they couldn’t shuck anymore. And another guy: They had to take his finger after he cut himself. And the big boss, he don’t care. He just gets another shucker. He just gets another sucker.
5.
“Put it up to your ear,” parents would say as their parents had said to them. “Listen to the ocean.” And when their children would follow their instructions and hear the sound, their smiles would shine down upon them, believing that their harmless lie, like the lies they tell about the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, and how Jonah was swallowed by a whale and spit up on a shell-filled shore, was what good parents should do. Soon enough, they believed, their children would be skeptical, would learn that the sound they were listening to was not the ocean, but the air moving through the shell structure. But when they next learned, as some parents do, that a shell in a soundproof room makes no sound, that the shell is nothing more and nothing less than a resonating chamber that picks up whatever sounds come its way, they feel a small part of them has been diminished by the lies they were told. Shells, they come to believe, carry the lies we tell about them. Shells amplify their truth.
6.
Three shells I brought home from a beach vacation sit on my bookshelf gathering dust. I do not remember why I selected these three shells. They are not rare or particularly colorful. The details of the trip have slipped away. They no longer serve as a reminder of some special connection. I seldom notice them. So when my wife asks why I’m keeping these dust collectors, I have no answer. “Why don’t you throw them away then?” she asks, and since I have no answer, I toss them in the trash. Now when I see a dust-free empty place in front of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the shells are there.
7.
That’s all I got—a fucking plastic plant and a shell. From one side to another—a plastic plant, a shell, a plastic plant, a shell. Do you have any idea what it’s like being in here? A fucking plastic plant, a fucking shell. I’m depressed. I guess I should feel lucky because I got one of the bigger bowls, but bowls distort everything when you look out, even Mr. Flatface with his creepy eyes that go away and then come back, sometimes in less than a second. I wish he’d look in here and see all the algae building up and that I’m swimming in my own shit. I can hardly breathe. It’s not like I got an air filter. Even that giant tub where I was born was better than this. At least there we had each other. Here, I’m all alone. I miss how we could gently rub against one another, protect ourselves by moving together, and let the strongest of us take the lead. The scientists might say that I’m “stressed.” Damn right I am. I’m unhappy. This is no way to live. A fucking plastic plant and a shell. I guess I had it best when I was at Petco. They kept the water clean and the temperature right. And, I had a little more room, not as much as I’d like, but enough that I could be with others like me and not feel cramped. And, they had more than just a plastic plant and a shell.
I know I’m just a little fish in a giant industry. Like the PETA people say, millions of us are sold each year. I know too that most of us are sold for less than a few bucks, not as much as the cost for a fucking glass bowl, a plastic plant, and a shell. Sold to Mr. Flatface. I’m his. My life depends on him. I don’t know how much longer I can take this. Sometimes the bastard will tap on the glass when I’m trying to sleep, just to see me move from the fucking plastic plant to the fucking shell and back again.
I admit I do swim to the top when Mr. Flatface comes with food. He thinks I’m glad to see him, but I just come for the food. I don’t want to starve. That’s no way to go. To tell you the truth, that’s what I spend my time doing, thinking about suicide. I might just rest dead-still on the bottom, just blow a bubble or two every now and then until I had no bubbles left. I’d like to think that would make Mr. Flatface feel responsible. Or, I could try jumping over the side. Maybe I’d land in a toilet, do a Nemo thing, change how I feel, but we all know none of us could survive going down those pipes. If I jumped, I rather land on the rug until the end came. Or maybe I could squeeze my way into that shell. I’d just stay there wrapped in its curves, as far away from him as I can get. I’d just hide there, hide until it was over. A fucking plastic plant and a shell.
8.
I am sitting at my desk thinking about amateur conchology and an image of a shirtless man in a straw hat comes to me. Perhaps his nose is covered in white sunscreen. This early morning beachcomber is scavenging for shells along the water’s edge. He searches for what he does not have, his head looking down to examine what has, with the waves’ help, rolled in. When he spots something of interest, he goes down to one knee for a closer look. Most of the shells he inspects he quickly discards, but some, after a quick rinse, he places in a small canvas bag that hangs from his shoulder. After his day’s search comes to an end, he returns home with a few items to add to his collection. He first places them in a container with a cleaning solution and then takes one shell out at a time, studies it under a bright lamp, and decides how it should be classified according to family, genus, and species. Those he particularly treasures he holds up in admiration, looking as if he were a Triton ready to trumpet its arrival. He then places each find in an appropriately labeled plastic container on the metal shelves surrounding the walls of the garage. He sits pleased with his day’s labor.
I see his two children, two boys, wondering what they should do with his collection after he dies. His wife, their mother, wants the shells gone. The boys, like their mother, do not share his love of mollusks. The boys try to donate his collection to a museum, but soon they learn his collection is of little scientific value. They try to sell it on eBay, but there are no buyers. “Probably the plastic containers have more value than the shells,” the older brother says.
The younger brother agrees and then is struck with another idea: “I know what we could do. Let’s put them back in the ocean. We could return them all there. I think Dad would like that.”
“Great idea. Maybe some small creatures might find them of some use.” They empty the containers into nine plastic bags and dump the shells from the side of a friend’s slow-moving boat. When done, the elder brother says, “It’s as if we were scattering Dad’s ashes.” They sit in silence for several minutes feeling the gentle work of the waves.
As I am imagining what the amateur conchologist’s sons might have done, I look over my desk and take in my collection of books organized according to disciplinary fields and their subject areas, all alphabetized with their kind. I remember the feel of those books in my hands, the joy of knowing they were mine, and the pleasure of placing those books where they belonged. I wonder what will happen to them when I’m gone, how they might find themselves taken from their shelves, how my wife and children might find a new arrangement, a new order.
9.
It’s one thing when they take what we abandon, although I don’t know why they think they’re entitled to do that. I can accept when they scoop us up so they can fill their bellies. That’s how the world works. We all live off of each other. But I’ll never understand why they take us just for our shells, use us for trinkets, for something to hang around their necks, for crafts for their kids. That makes no sense to me. I guess they’re just like that, always destroying things, always killing things for their pleasure.
10.
Shelter
I crawl into a shell
of my own making,
curl myself into protection
from what I might say,
what I might do.
Within, I feel safe, calm.
Within, I gather silence.
I am alone, shut down,
unavailable. The shell
I want is made of stone.
I won’t shed my shell
until I’m ready, hard-bellied.
The Sale
A shell, the exoskeleton of an invertebrate, is what’s left after death. I’m selling sea shells, one word after another. I am gathering sea shell stories, one at a time, to make a case I hope you’ll buy. It’s a rhetorical act designed to pull you in, to place you with me in this memorial of words about sea shells. I want you with me. I hope you will keep these pages so that we might hold what is left after loss. I offer it for the price of your time. My offer comes so that this construction might animate us, make us into an “us.” Together we can cover my coffin with words, turn it into a monument, into the commodity we might become.
References
Holman Jones, S. & Harris, A. M. (2019). Queering autoethnography. New York: Routledge.
Pelias, R. J. (2003). Stone, shell, feather. 360 Degrees: Art and Literary Review, np.
Ronald J. Pelias' most recent books, If the Truth Be Told (Sense Publications) and The Creative Qualitative Researcher (Routledge), call upon the literary as a research strategy. Now in retirement, he lets his writing lead him where it wants to go.