Why was I breaking things?
As I struggled to hang heavy curtains I'd sewn and
lined, their fabric caught on the neck of a vintage pink vase and toppled that
lovely heirloom to the floor. I froze. Four large pieces and smaller
shards of irreplaceable glass lay near my feet. I wanted the pieces
to jump up and put themselves back together. The vase had previously belonged
to a grandmother I'd only known for four years before she died.
The dog days of August are
upon us. My urge to plot out crime stories has temporarily abated. In the lull,
there’s always time to kill an ice cream cone.
My friend Nikki kills hers
by biting the bottom out first. I use my mother's technique. Bite off the peak
of the ice cream first. Catch the drippy parts near the top of the cone.
Another bite off the top and you're ready to relax and lick away the ice cream
that remains.
After that? Dispose of the evidence in whatever’s left of
your napkin supply after deciding what to do with what's left in the
bottom of the cone.
For celebratory
memory-making, Proust’s famous cookie has nothing on recalling moments shared
doing in a couple of ice cream cones.
Yesterday after a swim in
the Chesapeake Bay, my thoughts (followed by my feet) wandered over to Dairy
Queen. As I attacked the top of my cone, I had a memory of running along the
hot sand at Jones Beach as a kid. In my sticky bathing suit, I hopped from foot
to foot hoping I wouldn't drop the change I'd been given to buy a paper
cylinder of Neapolitan ice cream—so I could return to our blanket with a sticky
grin.
After my chiropractic
appointment recently, I pulled into a shopping center to see if my Weight
Watchers location was still there. It wasn't, but the Carvel store was. For
$4.50, that first taste of a soft-serve vanilla cone transported me back to
Glen Cove, Long Island in the 1960’s. In those years Mom celebrated our mutual
survival of my dental appointments by nosing her car into the parking lot of a
Carvel stand to share a cup or cone with me. She’d brand the little wooden
spoon or the swirl at the top before we finished it off with a smile.
On summer visits to
upstate New York, Mom introduced us to homemade ice cream from deep containers
at a store near where she grew up. I discovered vanilla fudge. Mom bit into
maple walnut. Sisters, Dad, and brother chose butter pecan, real strawberry,
and pistachio. That half hour spent ordering and devouring ice cream cones
while standing around the over-stuffed car was a time-out from packing,
driving, and arguing—and it switched each of us into "We're on vacation!”
mode.
My grandfather loved ice
cream in summer—especially someone else’s. I was six and had barely dipped my
spoon into the junior-sized hot fudge sundae he’d bought me when he pointed to
something I just had to see. By the time I got turned around in my chair again,
most of my sundae was gone.
Such a crime is shocking.
“Pop!” I cried. “You ate my ice cream!” The adults and children near us made
faces at him but he never apologized.
Dogs are usually prime
suspects when ice cream is missing. To ensure a good time is had by all in
Montreal, its summer ice cream stands offer each pet an ice cream-covered dog
bone—on the house.
Memory-making moments with
family grow fewer as I get older. But I had one last great one in
August, 2019. Mom and I took one of her “let’s just drive and see
where it leads” road trips between New Hampshire and Vermont.
We spotted the ice cream
stand near Quechee Gorge.
At age ninety-nine, Mom
looked terribly small sitting in my passenger seat. I figured she'd want a
small cup. I assumed she’d worry about dripping on her skirt and blazer.
Never assume. She’d grown
bolder with age. And she didn't give a hoot about her weight. She asked
for a double scoop chocolate cone. That was Dad and my brother’s
territory.
A few minutes later, I warily
passed her one of the two I’d ordered. We began to lick them to
death.
It was hot outside so we
stayed in the air-conditioned car but left the doors open in case the dripping
cones overwhelmed us. Mom's left a chocolate stain that's still on my passenger-side
floormat.
Her technique didn’t fail
her. We ate, laughed, got serious about our task, and then she beat me to the
bottom. Little evidence remained to be disposed of. We were giddy all the way
back to her senior residence.
Better ways may exist to
do in an ice cream cone. No one was more fun to share that experience with than
my Mom, who once had the novel idea of capping off a cavity-laden dental visit
with a trip to the soft serve stand.
 |
Take South Carolina v. Murdaugh, as entertaining
as a great screenplay.
Murdaugh—a creep who
never saw a vulnerable person he wouldn't fleece—had us on the edge of our
seats when he chose to take the stand. He cried in the jurors' direction and
offered alternative facts to them to escape accountability.
In a “fun and games”
moment, his attorney pointed a rifle at the prosecutor. The possibility of
reasonable doubt made my adrenaline kick in. The defense's hope of winning the
day was alive right up to the last two minutes of the film—I mean trial. I bit
my nails and hoped Alex hadn’t fooled any jurors.
When they found him
guilty, my dopamine kicked in. Shouldn't I have felt sad?
Why did I behave as if
I'd been to a show? To understand my reaction, I went to acuriosityofcrime.com and re-read their June
2022 research on nineteenth-century inquest protocols in “Murder as
Entertainment.”
The English or Welsh
coroner from the 1800's "who believed a death to be suspicious” sent
warrants to collect twelve to twenty-four jurors for inquest duty. "It was
to occur as soon as possible after notification of death."
No need to ask the boss for time off next month. Duty began in two
hours.
And where did jurors do
their service? "The morgue, or often where the body had been laid
out on their bed."
Talk about an adrenaline
rush. You're home—adding a lump of coal to the fire. A knock at the door
results in your immediate departure for a third-floor walk-up in a dodgy
neighborhood. You trudge up several flights to a tawdry bedsit where a fresh
corpse lies on the bed.
The room is packed with
other jurors. Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced comes to
mind.
I'm embellishing, but it
might have happened like that.
Inquest duty stories
from older relatives may have inspired Christie to write And Then There
Were None. In it, a letter from a stranger induces ten people to drop
everything and travel to an isolated location where they play judge, jury, and
defendant.
Back to our 1800's
juror. He was required to “peruse the corpse for signs of poisoning or
violence.” If a juror tried to turn away after just a "quick gander,"
"the inquest was voided and any investigation had to stop."
Not all jurors could
take the pressure. In one case, “A drunken juryman took offense and became
noisier and more difficult to control as the inquest went on.” In another “the
details of a poisoning were too much for the foreman of the jury and he
fainted. Everyone waited until he had recovered enough to rejoin the
proceedings.”
The body remained on
public display while "the jury gathered to hear testimony from everyone
who had something relevant to say." The suspects could question the
witnesses without being "obliged to say anything to criminate"
themselves.
Jurors asked questions,
too. Imagine the tension in the room as suspects gave their alibis in the room
with their possible victim, the victim's friend and all those over-stimulated
jurors. Maybe their adrenaline rush remains in our collective
memory when we watch Dateline.
After completing that
sort of jury duty I'd rush home for a strong cup of tea. But lots of jurors
must have headed for their local pub to wind up their friends and receive free
pints of ale for telling and re-telling their story.
If high-octane
story-telling lit the fire that continues to burn in us for true crime and
crime fiction today, and if a spark from that fire landed on me... then
I'm not to blame for staying up late reading a whodunnit or for perking up when
I hear the jury is back.
But should I forgive
myself for writing murder mysteries? A journalist once asked
crime fiction authors Jonathan and Faye Kellerman if they felt guilty using
murder as a vehicle to amuse people. Faye said no and that their
"readers find murder stories entertaining because—in the end—those
who hurt us are held accountable, cases are resolved, and the law wins.”
Samuel L. Clemens a/k/a Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known to most people by his pen name, Mark Twain, was born on November 3...
