I Scream

There's still time to enter to win free ice cream! Read this for details and to enter, and read below for a little inspiration. (Come on, regulars, win yourselves some ice cream! Don't let the drive-by contest-commenters steal your just desserts!)

Leah's Two Favorite Ice Cream Memories, Comment Style:

1. When I was little, the guy who lived next door to us used to periodically round up all the kids on our block, throw us in the back of his pickup, and drive us to the grocery store for ice cream cones. (I realize now that the first half of this sentence sounds like the introduction to a not-so-happy ending, but it was fine, really. The guy was a local politician; I mean, what could go wrong?) We always got some horrible flavor of blue ice cream that tasted like a cross between cereal milk and smashed Smurfs (or Smurves, if you will), and I have no idea if this was something that happened once per summer or once per week or only a few times ever, but it was such a fun treat that it will always be one of my best memories of childhood.

2. I took dance lessons in a stripmall studio for about five years, and at the end of every July we'd hold our big company recital in a high school auditorium. We were never a dance school that attended a dozen conventions or competed for trophies (i.e., we did not wear those freaky pageant hair pieces), so the annual recital was always a BIG DEAL, something we started practicing for in January. Seven months of hard work, seven months of sweat and sprains, seven months of avoiding trampolines and tan lines, all was rewarded with a company-wide post-recital ice cream binge at ye olde timey ice cream parlor (albeit in a stripmall) called Leatherbys. (Anyone?) I always got the banana split, not because I liked even half of the stuff they dumped on it (or could eat even a third of it myself) but because it looked and felt the most celebratory. Three kinds of ice cream, three kinds of sauce, nuts, whipped cream, and a cherry on top...it doesn't get better than that.

Simon's Favorite Ice Cream Memory, Charming Anecdote Style:

Picture, if you will, my trip to Northern Wisconsin to paint with my Uncle Jim. Jim was a famous painter, as far as watercolorists go, and I was lucky to have the chance to go and learn from a master. I’d only met octogenarian Uncle Jim and his octogenarian wife Aunt Edna a few times before, but I knew that they were kind, sweet, and loving. They were also what you might call Super Baptists. As in pious, upstanding, and clean. Never had a sip of alcohol passed one of their four lips, except, as I learned later, when Uncle Jim had tried some champagne on a New Years’ Eve back in the 40’s, and had felt bad about it for decades. And did I say pious? To say the least, my week in the woods of Northern Wisconsin was completely bereft of anything titillating or taboo. The defining characteristic of the Depression-era Super Baptist Aunt Edna was that she collected toast crumbs from the tablecloth after each breakfast to use on top of Sunday’s meat loaf.

So it was on my last day, after five intense days of color mixing, brush practice, and composition analysis, that we went out for a summer treat – ice cream! Ice cream is a favorite of the pious. There are no concerns that ice cream will corrupt. Ice cream is so Norman Rockwell, so Marion the Librarian, so Mom and apple pie. There is nothing taboo or titillating about ice cream. Going out for ice cream is an activity during which Depression-era Super Baptists can be assured that nothing remotely off-color can happen.

Jim and Edna’s local ice cream parlor was a typical Midwest rural ice cream parlor. It was a stand-alone 12x14 building with a red and white striped awning and rosy cheeked employees wearing pointy hats and red vests. 16 flavors? Check. Wrought iron tables and chairs? Check. Bugs flying in the warm evening air? Check. Sunset streaming through the tops of pine trees? Check. I had chocolate, Aunt Edna had strawberry, and Uncle Jim had pistachio.

We sat in silence, eating our ice cream. Just then, Edna noticed that Jim’s ice cream wasn’t just pistachio flavored; it had big pistachios right in it. She looked at me with her big, watery, earnest eyes, and said with great enthusiasm, “Uncle Jim has GREAT BIG NUTS.”

I never could explain to her just why I was laughing for the next three hours.

wrote Leah at 6:36 AM | Comments (6)