Time isn’t what it used to be. Two moments this week reminded me of how different the sensation of swimming in time (floating, as Walt Whitman might say?) was in our youth.
The first sounds kind of stupid in its non-profundity: Just sitting around with my friends Ross and Sarah in her Sag Harbor front parlor at midday on a gray Sunday without any electric lights on, the old kilim rug thrown over her couch scratchy against the back of my legs.
An unlighted, un-electrified room — not much sun coming in through the windows under the sprawling Japanese maple in the yard and a clock ticking in the next room — brings me straight back to the dull hours of childhood. Before the digital age, thoughts formed in darkened rooms; we were overcome by an amber feeling of slowness, noticing nothing much but an incremental decay, evidenced by nothing more interesting than the motes of dust too weightless to fall (just moving aimlessly in the air) and the way, if you let your head rest sleepily on the wall, you could see an accumulation of the dust, very weightless and only faintly gray, on the molding of the wainscoting.
The second reminder of how slowly time used to move (to progress? to pass?) was eating clams from Three Mile Harbor for dinner the night before, on Saturday.
How is it possible that all through my late teens and my entire 20s I had enough spare time on my hands on any given summer weekend to go out (in a boat or wading in the bay, alone or with a companion) to dig with my toes in the sandy bottom, bring up a bushel of hard clams, mosey towards home (listening to Booker T. and the M.G.s on the car stereo, stopping to buy the good white corn from Pike’s), then prepare them, steamed or roasted on a grate over an open fire or in a pan with white wine, garlic, and butter?
How, I ask you, did I ever have the time?
The answer to this non-puzzler is, again, not profound: It’s the internet, stupid! That time-and-reality-stealer and the greatest time thief of them all: parenthood. Ain’t nobody — who’s a mom or dad — got time for wandering barefoot over the blistering blacktop of Napeague, swinging a bucket and a clam rake as the sun block, melting, stings your eyes and a lone fish hawk on the hunt circles and calls overhead in his deceptively reedy and unmenacing voice. (The fish hawk is a con man.)
Parenthood, in my case, coincided with the arrival of the hand-held internet — the iPhone being born exactly 10 days before my daughter was born, in 2007. All in a fell swoop, humanity lost its dull moments of reflection, those non-events in which your mind creates its new neural pathways. All at once, we found ourselves endlessly entertained, forever. It’s so boring.
Anyway, I don’t sit often in quiet, darkened rooms anymore just chatting idly about film noir and astrological signs, and I haven’t been clamming in maybe seven or eight years.
My friend Artie, the sexton at the Presbyterian Church, had dug the clams in Three Mile a couple of weeks ago, not me. I didn’t even open them myself; they were opened by my friend David, our town justice, on the promise that I’d make the fritters. David kindly kept the clams and their juice in his freezer until I had gotten my act together well enough to fulfill my promise of hosting a clam fritter dinner chez moi. They were the finest kind of hard clams (which I refuse to call “quahogs” on principle, or even “hard-shell clams,” as “hard clams” is what they were called in my childhood): big, fat, heavy fellows with thick orange feet (the best part) and the silver-and-gray shell that told me they weren’t seeded from the hatchery but were the native kind.
The method for frying perfect clam fritters was taught to me, circa 1989-ish, by another friend, Jason, a longtime rock-and-roller with a Troggs mop top who doesn’t live around here anymore. Back then, when I was nominally an American-history student in college — but really more of a professional boulevardier, time-waster, loafer, and bartop-dancer — I had people over for dinner all the time. I’d make peach pie with the Julia Child crust. I’d make grilled striped bass with a green herb and anchovy sauce. The dinner parties ground to a halt, entirely, when I moved to Canada in 2009. I think I’ve had . . . let’s see, maybe four dinner parties since 2009?
Well, two gifts drew me out of the hermit cave of my bedroom on Saturday evening, the hard clams and the opening of the hard clams, and even though it’s been decades since I made the fritters — and fretted that my guests would arrive only to be disappointed by a subpar clam dish — they came out perfectly. I couldn’t quite remember the exact method Jason taught me, when Jason and I were chain smokers but nimble of limb and optimistic of mind-set, with sunburned noses and impressive record collections, but I pieced it back together after consulting with Jacques Franey’s “60-Minute Gourmet.” Chef Franey was a clam lover, as any decent Springs man must be; these aren’t quite how he made his, but the method was correct.
Green-Herb Clam Fritters
Serves 8
4 cups fresh hard clams, roughly chopped
2/3 to 3/4 cup clam juice
3 cups white flour
3 tsp. baking powder
3 eggs
1/4 cup fresh tarragon, chopped (or more)
1/4 cup fresh chives, chopped
4 Tbsp. parsley, chopped
Big pinch salt
2 tsp. Tabasco sauce
Vegetable oil
In a big bowl, mix eggs and herbs into chopped clams. Sift flour and baking powder over clam mix. Add salt and Tabasco. It should be gloopy, thicker than pancake batter but not as thick as cookie dough. Thin it with clam juice if it feels too dry. Heat half an inch of vegetable oil in a large cast-iron pan. Once the oil is hot, hot, hot (around 340 degrees, check by seeing if a tiny piece of batter will sizzle immediately), drop in big spoonfuls of clam mix, flattening the fritter a bit with the back of the spoon, so it’s the rough shape and size of a potato pancake. You should see bubbles of hot oil rising through the batter. If oil smokes, it’s too hot. Flip carefully when well-browned. When both sides are, say, hazelnut color (but not yet as dark as a chestnut), drain the fritters on a paper towel. Serve hot.
Don’t think about omitting the tarragon. Don’t do it. It’s all about the tarragon. Why tarragon was so much easier to find in the supermarkets and farm stands of the 1970s — as easy to find as a perfect dull afternoon, sitting in a deck chair listening to the gulls of August and watching the vapor of a jet in the far, pale-blue, and silent sky — is a subject for another week.