The story below is an excerpt from our September/October 2017 issue. For the rest of this story and more like it subscribe today, log in to read our digital edition or download our FREE iOS app. Thank you!
You start early enough in life with way too much at one serving, you could well be hooked for life.
The memory of your first kiss—second grade, on the playground, placed in the same spirit as the day before when you gave her a flower and then ran away, or perhaps the day before when you pushed her on the shoulder and ran away—is akin to the event itself . . . fleeting, indistinct and gone in the piece of a second that it endured.
Only a little less precise are the first memories of ice cream.
And while I’m sure this was not be the actual first taste, this is first lasting-memory taste, well before the first kiss, and was on a grassy hillside on a warm summer day. The cone fit well in my hand, but its contents were huge—reaching up and out in a perfect chocolate shape.
This was at the Clover Creamery, where my grandfather took us on selected weekend days when we spent the summers in Radford, Virginia. There was a white fence around the building, and people of all ages spread out over the grassy slope with their cones. The memory is both vivid and gauzy, kind of black-and-white and with hints of a Fellini movie maybe.
Jump ahead a few years to the hike my father took me on, along the Appalachian Trail in Maine. My duty on several occasions, as a very short person (as 9-year-olds are prone to be), was to crawl under the blow-downs from Hurricane Carol. The three men on the trip told me they were too tall, and I guess I bought it.
But there was the reward, intermittent though it was: Every so many days, we would pass through a town, and in each of those, I knew what awaited me: My very own pint of ice cream.
I do not remember the flavors, but I’m sure vanilla would have been perfectly satisfactory to that boy digging a spoon again and again into his own folded carton until it was empty.
Though I should admit that it was likely gateway behavior to the practice my brother and I occasionally undertook some years hence: Sitting down at the kitchen table, taking a half gallon of Breyers ice cream out of the freezer, knifing through the carton right down the middle, and proceeding to put the contents away.
