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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.
9 Responses
I see you have yet to understand how much Mainers love ice cream.
Buck! Truck?
Every summer we English drive to the seaside and then sit looking out through the windows at the driving rain while eating ham butties, an ice cream (a ninety niner) sets the day off…every summer.
Ah, at last, a pulpomizer!
What is not to love about the pulpomizer?
our ice cream dudes appeared in the summer. only. dueling loudspeakers – a conflict between the corporate and reliable mr softy – what's that about?- and the fat man in a little yellow truck – fat man stinks, smokes stinkier stogies, exceedingly disagreable fellow in yellowed, stained t-shirt, likely went on to haunt gunshows – fat man must contend with shoplifters er trucklifters? neighborhood sports?
mr softy always with a smirk, freebies for attractive teen gurlz, who knows what for others when his back is turned attending to the soft serve?
what posseses such folk to a life of ice cream – seeking ignomius immortality?
I don't know where that pulp-o-mizer came from, but DANG! I loved it. Read some of those old pulps yars ago. Shaver mystery–Deroes and Teroes.
Well, based on what you've been telling us about the part of Maine you live in, it might be an economy thing.
You can save money on electricity by storing the ice cream outside, putting in the freezer only when you need to get it soft enough to scoop out and eat.
So which are you- an elderly woman or a dog?