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Everything makes me sick, including dairy products. Ice cream, in particular, wreaks havoc with my cold-averse throat and lungs. Doctors have instructed me to avoid it, well-meaning friends have related to me their acupuncturists’ admonitions to stay away from the stuff, and vegan pals have clapped me on the back in camaraderie when I tell them I don’t eat it.

Which I don’t. Usually. Mostly.

Sometimes. I sometimes eat ice cream.

After all, if joy had a patron food saint, it would be ice cream. Ice cream is the panacea for ailments universal, from heartbreak to amputated tonsils to skinned knees and existential ennui. The tinkling melody of the ice cream truck is the harbinger of summer. The voluminous freezer cases at the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s near my house in the sizzling Valley open like the gates of heaven, sending icy waves tumbling out over me as I take in the vast array of species, genus and phyla of yogurts, ices, gelatos, sorbets, granites, creams, ice milks and sherbets; the glass doors fog to opacity as I’m assaulted by a riot of joyful colors, multiple rainbows, floating incandescent fruit and quarries of chocolate under vanilla skies and strawberry fields. And then the methods of delivery: quarts or pints or gallons, bars and bombes and Neapolitan sandwiches, on sticks and in sugar cones, encased with chocolate shells or in sticky Mochi pockets or infused with chunks of cookie (dough or Oreo), shaped like Spongebob or injected into cannoli; alarmingly blue raspberry in impossible shapes; French vanilla bean layered with wafers, or piercingly sweet-sour citrus sorbet in tiny little Meyer lemon peels.

Summer may come crashing down, but we fend it off Greystoke-like with our Good Humor chocolate éclair bar brandished, and our trusty Moon Pie watches our back. We are icy cool, undefeated by the sweltering heat that buckles the blacktop and flattens our dogs, panting, to cool concrete floors; we triumphantly lick sticky drips off our arms and lay claim to a vanquished summer. We are maybe 8 years old.

But ice cream melts, summer always ends, snow blankets the upper reaches of the Appalachians in Maine, making passage impossible; we go back to school and lay aside our rainbow sherbet push-pop armor, and soon we get too old to run out to the street when the ice cream man jingles around the corner. The song that was once a tug on a chain round our sugar-starved necks now sounds tinny, and repetitive, and maybe a little cheap. We stay in air-conditioned buildings far from mountains and work smart. We are efficient and careful. Ice cream is high in fat and cholesterol and carbs. Summer passes us by, or is merely a good excuse to get outdoors for our scheduled exercise. We jog at stoplights to keep our heart rates up and intently ignore the ice cream truck.

-le copy du right, lucinda michele knapp 2006

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Page last modified on September 01, 2006, at 08:46 AM
Originally by anathemata.