Childhood

The Ice-Cream Man in the little truck playing “Bicycle Built for Two” speeds up as I run out of my house wallet in hand with ice-cream on my mind. No, really … with chocolate on my mind. not the good kind of chocolate connoisseurs like with caramel and salt but the kind from childhood, the ice-cream bar with thin slabs of chocolate around a stick of vanilla ice-cream so cold in the heat that taste doesn’t matter, lying with my sister on the grass before her illness trying to eat the bars before they dripped sticky onto our necks and chests, nibbling the top, then the sides, and finally, licking the last bit off the wooden stick savoring even that woody taste.

But now the Ice-Cream man speeds down the street at the end of his day. He no longer hears “Bicycle Built for Two,” or sees the line of children chasing him or me waving my wallet and shouting at the top of my lungs to the receding truck, I remember!                I remember!

FEWalls