Abalone
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 09/10/2020

Day 205 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "Monterey is a California town of Spanish streets lined with houses of a time when Proud Spain ruled the West Coast. Tourist cars run to the house where Robert Louis Stevenson lived. In the harbor one may see Italian fishermen mending nets, putting out to sea, coming home with toll taken from deep waters. And roundabout the pyramids of abalone shells are stacked high.

"It is a world capital of abalone. At the lunch counters abalone is a favorite dish, a nutritious mollusk. His shell makes shirt buttons by the carload. . . . From Monterey we go to Carmel-By-The- Sea, past cypress trees, tough twisted torsoes lashed by long winds, shapes of storm transfixed with a momentary peace.a picture for pilgrims. . . .Then at Carmel we hear Abalone its stanzas chiefly a bequest of George Sterling of San Francisco. . . . Beach fire singers have flung it with laughter at goblins of the half moon, the rising full moon, and the waning silver crescent."