Santa Monica Pier - Jody

Santa Monica Pier

We are going to Los Angeles, San Francisco + California I remember telling my 3rd grade class in New York, not quite realizing that they weren’t 3 separate places.

In San Francisco, we drove through the Haight Ashbury, and looked at the hippies with the windows rolled up.

A long time shell collector, I was excited to go to the beach in California to collect sea shells. The coastline of Long Island + Brooklyn was no more exotic than razor clams and moon snails…

We came to Santa Monica and there were lots of little starfish dried up on the beach! With a bucket full of shells, we walked down the pier, where there was a Sea shell shop, owned by a woman named Nancy Hutchinson, or something like that. My parents let me pick out any shell I wanted. I chose a carrier snail — a big snail which cements shells or small pebbles onto the rim of its shell at more or less regular intervals When it selects an object, the snail squirts glue from its own body onto its shell. What is cemented there is a function of what is available on the substrate on which the snail lives.

I was so amazed by the collection of shells in this shop in Santa Monica that Nancy Hutchinson, I’d met in the shop, became my one + only pen pal.