The seventh day of the eighth month of the year of the OP

OLD BAY SEASONING

I saw someone had a photo of a box of old bay seasoning on their Facebook page and it brought back all kinds of nostalgia.

This is, "The Cranky Crab" image I made some years ago on a dock on Maryland's eastern shore in a little town called Rock Hall. Population small!

The town where I grew up in the summers.

We could go out on any dock along the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay or the bay itself for that matter, and catch crabs all day long. That's changed today. Too many people, trash, pollution, yada, yada, yada. But that's a story for another day. Incidentally, they do bite and hard.

These are blue crabs and are stage one dinner. Add some Old Bay and steam and they turn red (now you know what they are) and they're stage two. A true delicacy.

But back to my childhood, well adulthood as well. I have cooked and eaten more crabs than I like to think and all I can say is..... it is not enough.

We kids would get some string, chicken necks or other bait, dip nets, bushel baskets, and spend a day on the docks catching these critters. We caught them with bait or just dipped them as they hung on the pilings. This was my early teens, you know a hundred years ago. What we didn't eat, we sold at the local fish house.

Back in the late fifties and sixties in Maryland, most restaurants had pin ball machines you could play for a nickel a game. If you won, the restaurant would pay a nickel a game for however many you had scored. Man, this system was like Manna from heaven for us kids.

We would start out on Mondays collecting as many crabs as we could catch either off the docks or wading the shallows. A bushell or two would stake us to the next step in financial independence.

Off to the restaurants with our crab money and onto the machines. Well, a mid-teenager KNOWS how to play a pinball machine and win. If you ran up 300 games, well that was fifteen dollars and you still had most of your crab money left over.

On top of all that we took our shoes off in June and didn't put them back on till September. Our parents always wondered where we got our money from.

That was the land of pleasant living.