When you lick an ice cream cone, a really really god ice cream cone, you get that inital soft scoop of it on your tongue and you pull it into your mouth. Curled there on top of your tonge, it melts and squishes around your mouth and teeth, you sometimes let it slide down your throat, half-melted. Other times you give it the once over in your mouth, seeking chunks of stuff in it, just in case. Then down it goes and you go for that next lick. Never quite as good as the first one, but always great. You catch the drips down the side and in the end you dispose of the cone last and then it’s all gone. Melted away down your throat and sometimes on your shirt or shorts. The last of the ice cream gone.
In the summer time, all the Ice Cream stands are open for business. They have big signs that implore you to come try their amazing flabors. Some sell Gelato or Sherbert, soft-serve or sundaes. They all want your money for their wares. Bored teenagers and flamboyant foreign men all vie for your dollars as the summer marches on.
In Scotland you can get a 99, which is a cone (usually soft-serve) with two chocolate bars stuck in it (Flakies) that give the eater a chance to choose betwen keeping the ice cream from melting and eating around the chocolate bars, or eating the chocolate first and running the risk having ice cream down your shirt. The choice was yours.
In Ontario (and other places I assume) we had no ice cream trucks, ratehr the Dickie Dee cart, which was a bike-cart deal that a surly teenage boy or a jubilant girl would push around the streets, ringing a series of bells. The reaction was the same as that to the Ice Cream truck, balls and toys would drop, aliens would go unfought, cobra commander’s final blow never landed and children would stream to the street with whatver cash they could get from their parents to buy some seriously overpriced frozen treats.
Then Summer would come to an end, and the Ice Cream stands would close, one by one. The last holdout left with a big tub of pralenes and cream and heavenly hash to sell. Hard. Icy. Bricklike. It was the last of the summer Ice Cream and it was still better than anything else, because it was the last of Summer.
Tomorrow, School.