Ice cream luck

Ice cream has always been one of my favorite desserts. Wait! Let’s hold on for a second. Did I say dessert? I meant to say that ice cream has been one of my favorite foods since I was a boy. My favorite flavor has always been anything that has fruit in it. My least favorite flavors are those they don’t have fruit, like caramel or chocolate. Of course, because it’s ice cream, I would eat it, but it wouldn’t be my first choice. The only exception to this rule is butter pecan. This is a flavor that is not available in Japan unless you buy it on the military base. Butter pecan has always been one of my favorite ice cream flavors.

When I was a boy, my siblings and I loved going to the ice cream shop. Baskin Robbins was our favorite. Our second favorite was Dairy Queen. We loved Baskin-Robbins the most because it had 31 flavors. Going there was always an adventure. The flavors were different every time so we never knew what to expect. Honestly, I don’t like Baskin-Robbins ice cream now because I prefer ice cream that’s just milk, eggs, sugar, fruit or nuts, and nothing else. I don’t need a bunch of ingredients that I can’t pronounce in my ice cream. Of course, when I was a boy I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted the cold sweet taste of it. Summer or winter, the season didn’t matter and still doesn’t. I love ice cream.

One of the strongest of my childhood memories is going to Dairy Queen with my mother, younger brother, and sister. Mother piled us all in the car and took us for a drive. At the Dairy Queen window she asked us all what we wanted. None of us really liked chocolate ice cream, so we all got vanilla with a candy shell. I can’t remember what my siblings asked for but I do remember my own order. It was always the same. Vanilla ice cream with strawberry or cherry dip. Dairy Queen had this miraculous liquid they dipped the ice cream in. The longer liquid stayed on the ice cream, the harder it got until it became a kind of candy shell. Mother had forgotten that Brian wasn’t there. She ordered four cones out of habit. Because I was the second oldest, she gave me Brian’s ice cream‘s. Man, did I feel like a big shot. I was the envy of my younger siblings whose eyes grew wide when they saw me holding those two magnificent strawberry dipped cones.

Unfortunately, the ice cream didn’t last very long. Shortly after we had gotten back on the road and I was licking both cones one after the other, a car ran a red red light right into our path. We smashed hard into it. My ice cream cones both went flying into the windshield. My mother’s car was very old and, like many things that were made long ago, it was strong. The other people’s car was not so old and it crumpled like a piece of paper. I don’t remember if the drivers of the other car were OK. I do remember that they were a pair of elderly ladies. My mom frantically got out of the car and ran to the back to check on my two younger siblings. My brother was crying, probably because he had lost his ice cream, or so I thought. Mother ran to give him hugs and kisses and asked if he was OK. I remember thinking to myself, “huh, if I cry too, maybe she’ll give ME some hugs.“ So, I cried even though there was nothing wrong with me. Sure enough, Mother came and wrapped her great big arms around me and gave me lots of hugs and made sure I was OK before she went off to check to see if the people in the other car were safe.

When I looked back, my brother was holding ice cream in his hands and eating it. I was shocked because my ice creams were both all over the front windshield. I couldn’t believe his had been spared. When I asked him about it he said, “I caught mine. I caught it with my hands.“ At the time, I believed him and envied his luck. It was only later that I realized that, by scooping the ice cream off the floor, my brother had made his own luck.