11.29.2010.2

It is ten forty-five pm, and the neon signs illuminating the Safeway parking lot wait anxiously on the threshold between “open” and “closed.” Their quivering light skips over curbsides and cars to reach the street, where it meets a harshly glowing left-hand turn signal and waits, breathless, for a chance to turn green.

In the first car, the man in the Armani jacket adjusts his Bluetooth headset and feels the pulse in his palm beating in time with the email notifications on his Blackberry. In the second car, the boy with the bruised knuckles reaches into the passenger seat for a beer and then stops, looks at the can of Diet Coke already in his hand, and contemplates his cluttered cup holders. And in the third car, the ponytailed girl watches the light as she carefully, carefully lifts her left foot from the clutch and extends a leg swathed in pink pajama pants until her battered plastic sandal rests against the floor of the cab.

The man in the Armani jacket tries to decide which meeting to attend at nine-fifteen tomorrow. The boy with the bruised knuckles wonders why the Coke feels so cold. The ponytailed girl bargains with herself for a quart of ice cream and plans a strategy for moving her foot back onto the clutch. The neon signs resign themselves to another ten minutes of positive messaging. The signal changes.

A wide, graceful u-turn, and the BMW aligns itself in the opposite outside lane. The man in the Armani jacket smugly selects his meeting. To his left, the dusty Volvo shrieks its resentment and pulls level on the inside, wretched and volatile in empty victory. The boy with the bruised knuckles contracts his face in pain and crumples the Coke can to match. The signal turns yellow.

And in the stripped-down stick-shift pickup, with the neon signs sparkling against its champagne paint job, the ponytailed girl leans like a puppy out the driver’s side window and stares. She stares as her memories of glass and metal angels streak out of their azure summer sky and vanish into the night, borne on the emptiness between rubber and asphalt. She stares until she begins to laugh, until she misses the signal, until tears of wonder dot her pink pajama pants, until finally she screams “That was amazing!” and imagines that somehow the beautiful strangers in their tinted-window worlds will share in her unkempt joy.

The stoplight turns red and green and yellow and red again. The ponytailed girl emerges from the Safeway with a gallon of Mocha Almond Fudge. The boy with the bruised knuckles sighs and reaches under the seat for another silver can. The man in the Armani jacket arrives home and fixes himself a cup of coffee.

The neon signs sparkle, and squirm, and proclaim the hour in a single harsh burst as they triumphantly transform. 

11.29.2010

I have developed a superior technique for eating ice cream.

Ice cream kicks ass. Creamy, sweet, cold and smooth and available in your size whether your size is chocolate or Chubby Hubby, peanut brittle or peppermint, simple vanilla or saffron tomato – ice cream succeeds on every point…but one. Ice cream melts. I just hate it when ice cream melts. Ice cream fails me by melting, breaks down, defies my expectations of structure and solidity and leaves me staring mournfully into a bowl of warm soupy sugary stuff that dribbles out of my spoon and leaves a syrupy, unsatisfying aftertaste in my mouth and my mind. The melting of ice cream exemplifies entropy, and it is the most obnoxious example of entropy that I know.

To make matters worse, ice cream melts fastest in the summer, when I most want it to stay frozen and steadfast for as long as the inconvenient forces of physics will allow. I want to lever my ice cream spoonful by spoonful out of a little paper parlor cup and roll it in marble-sized balls of goodness around my warm mouth until it slides, still semi-solid, into my stomach. I want to hold an ice cream cone as I window-shop along a beachfront boardwalk, relishing every delicate motion of my tongue over the smooth, sweet sphere, and I want to find icy deliciousness in the bottom of the cone when I get there. I do not want to find flavored milk, and I certainly don’t want the bottom of the cone to leak the troubled ghost of unfulfilled ice cream all over my shorts.

Last summer, I went on a crusade to prevent my ice cream from melting. I first tried serving ice cream in a small bowl nestled in a big bowl, the big bowl full of ice cubes, but the ice cream still turned soft and soupy around the edges when I scooped it into its new environment. I ditched the ice and tried leaving the serving bowl in the freezer for half an hour before scooping the ice cream. That worked better, but I still lost ground when the ice cream touched the scoop. I froze the scoop with the bowl. Better. I froze the scoop, the bowl, and the spoon I planned to eat the ice cream with. Getting there.

Finally, one late-summer afternoon, divine intervention struck. I had just transferred frozen ice cream to frozen bowl and stuck frozen scoop in the dishwasher, and I had frozen spoon in hand and poised to get down to business before the whole thing succumbed to the inevitable downslide, when the phone rang. I panicked and stuck the full bowl with the spoon on top back in the freezer, a serving of Kate’s Specially-Prepared Meltproof Dessert on hold and waiting for attention.

Half an hour later, I hung up on my least-favorite uncle and returned to the freezer with my heart in my throat to see if I’d ruined my ice cream and therefore my evening.

But no – I could tell as soon as I lifted the bowl that I had created a small miracle. The little ensemble of frozen items just felt different, had a different weight in my hands. The ice cream crystals clung to the pale ceramic bowl, the frosty metal of the spoon nestled against the curved imprint that the scoop had left on the ice cream's coffee-flavored canvas, and I could feel the bowl and the spoon bending their solidity, all their embodied cold, to the task of keeping the ice cream from slipping away into some less noble state of matter. The bowl, the spoon, and the ice cream had all been frozen before – but now, they were all frozen together.

I learned four lessons that summer. First, ice cream is a make-ahead dessert, no matter what the “ten minute meals” page in the back of your Bon Appetít may think. Second, you should never, ever allow anything that is not itself frozen to touch your ice cream. Third, if you freeze your ice cream and your bowl and your spoon all together, they will help each other stay that way.  

And finally, if you learn and apply the first three lessons, you will add measurable joy to the world.

Now that you know I’m a nut, we can begin, with a little story that I feel relates through some existential channel to the Four Laws of Ice Cream. But that’s for you to judge.