I ~ E L D Ix in the palm of a calloused hand, and my fingers,

edged with ragging nails, trembled so the pearl quivered with

light; and then and there any plans my mother had for making

me into a concert violinist drained like rain off a hill to become

one with my mysterious river.

Since that day I have always been planning to go back to

see if the big, black clams still cluster where Wisconsin s Rock

River sweeps the clay bottoms at the sharp bends, hoping to

find one with a pearl luminous as the moon and worth maybe

a thousand dollars.

But I never get there, and I do not even know if pollutants

have killed off the clams and my dream is, after all, just that

--a dream.

Once it wasn t. As a sunburnt crisp of a boy I opened and

examined tons of clams to obtain a wine glass full of precious

seedling

pearls with which I was loath to part. There was no

fascination comparable to spreading them on a card table,

watching the light, like tunes of a song, play a hundred, a

thousand variations on the same theme.

My precious pearls! What horizons they lighted! And then

to lose them--all of them--down the huge, circular hot air

register of my grandmother s furnace.