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.
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