So I’m Eating My Lunch

So I’m eating my lunch.

It’s 42 degrees out. The sky is like passing a battleship in a skiff. We got a couple of inches of snow yesterday. The plow came by a couple times, yesterday afternoon and evening, which flummoxed me. I checked to see if the seal on the door of the truck had been altered to read:  The Department of Public Works and Mordant Humor. It hadn’t.

So I’m eating my lunch. I hear this sound. My wife staggered up next to me, and we looked out the window together. “It can’t be,” we said in unison.

Oh, it be, as Elaine Benes used to say. There is an ice cream truck driving around our neighborhood.

So, I’m eating my lunch. When I’m done, I’m going down into the basement, and assembling all the components and pieces and parts and appurtenances and tools I own, I’m going to spend what may very well be the bulk of the remainder of my natural life trying to assemble  a machine that can possibly measure how utterly and irrevocably insane you’d have to be to drive an ice cream truck through the slush in forty-degree weather around a moribund mill town populated exclusively by elderly women and their dogs.

If I’m successful — in a decade or three — and have any time left, I’ll turn my attention to inventing a second machine capable of measuring the insanity of any customers.