An ice cream truck and my little brother.
“You know what, I saw the coolest thing earlier today, I meant to tell you,” Anthony said as we walked out of the restaurant we’d just had dinner at and towards the car sitting in the parking lot. “Oh yeah?” I asked, staring at my feet as they made their way across the dark asphalt. I didn’t need to see his face to hear the smile lurking inside his words. “Yeah. It was an ice cream truck!” he revealed, his voice swelling with something more than nostalgia. There was a brittle excitement in his words, one that placed us squarely in our childhoods, when days could be broken as easily as the pop-off head of a GI Joe, yet mended as expediently with a dripping, sticky ice cream bar from the man with the white hat who spent his days inside a white, metal truck.
I slipped my arm through his and leaned my head against his broad shoulder. “Oh my god! I loved ice cream trucks when I was little! Which ice cream was your favorite?” I queried, while trying to think what my answer would be to that same question. Let’s see, I thought to myself as a catalogue of ice cream bars began scrolling through my head. There were those strawberry good humor bars, but I think those came way later. I know I liked that cone thingy with the bubble gum at the bottom, even though the gumball was always too hard and the gum never lasted longer than a few minutes. Jaesun always went for something colorful, probably because he liked Superman.
“You know, I can’t really remember. Let’s see….” Anthony mumbled. “You know, I think it was, like, red, white and blue?”
“The rocket, right? The one shaped like a rocket. Yeah my brother liked that one too,” I murmured into his hoodie. And I could see it, in my head, feel the sticky, sweet syrup staining my fingers, finding its way beneath my fingernails. I could see my brother’s face, a joker’s smile stretching out across it as he tossed the slightly pink popsicle stick into the trash bin. “God, I haven’t seen one of those in a long time!” I said.
I could hear the tinkle of the ice cream truck that used to make its circuit around Terminal Park–the park my father would drop me and my brother off at each morning for summer camp. Before she left for work, Omma would leave a small mound of change on the kitchen table that Jaesun and I would divvy up for “ice cream money”–a few coins, each, as ice cream was pretty cheap back then! One day, though, Jaesun and I weren’t given the chance to use our allowance.
The white truck with its faded paintings of frozen treats ambled to a slow stop at its usual spot along the curb at the far southeast corner of the park. The soft sounds of its jingle floated over the swarthy summer air, luring campers in like pint-sized zombies to a carnal feast. But the camp counselors wanted to teach us all a lesson on littering. The rolling green grass of the park was, indeed, strewn with discarded wrappers, soda cans, chip bags, sandwich wrap. It was hard to know whether we, the campers, were, in fact, the culprits, but we were tasked with picking up the trash anyway. Part of the lesson entailed forgoing our daily visit with the ice cream truck.
This enraged my little brother.
Keep in mind, my brother–probably only 8 years old at that time–was able to stoke a small but mighty rage. He once chased me around the backyard of our Skokie house with a hammer (no, I cannot recall why) and when I eluded him by safely ducking behind the screen door that led into our kitchen and stuck my tongue out at him as older sisters are wont to do, he roared until tears sprang from his lids as he swung that hammer straight into the glass door. It shattered in an unthinkably satisfying way, a satisfaction that was only enhanced by the sound of my mother’s thundering footsteps, followed by lots of shrieking at my baby brother.
[We can discuss, at another time, whether my brother’s furor was merited.]
So when faced with the prospect of being denied his daily sweet treat, the red, white, and blue rocket that would, fleetingly, but decisively, neutralize the sweat-inducing temperatures of another hot and humid Chicago summer day, Jaesun threw yet another tantrum. Specifically, he literally threw the money my mother had left for him in the trash (along with the other items he was being forced to pick up). I can still hear the hollow “clink-clink” echoing from the rusty, steel canister as the coins landed in their new home.
Later that night, I regaled Omma with the unfairness, the total injustice of being made to pick up other people’s trash. They had no evidence against us! (I truly was meant to be a lawyer…I can see why she tried to push me into it for so long…lol). But of course, Omma was interested in only one thing:
“What happened to the money I gave you this morning?” I dutifully pulled out the coins from my pocket and plunked them into her outstretched hand. Jaesun, however, looked down at his feet.
I won’t go into the details of what ensued. Let’s just say it was the hammer-on-the-glass-door incident, Part 2. To this day, I can hear my mother SCREAMING, “YOU DON’T THROW AWAY EVEN ONE PENNY!!! ONE PENNY!!!!”
Now, isn’t it pretty amazing, actually extraordinary, that all of this [gesturing upwards at the words above] was triggered by one, innocuous sentence: “I saw an ice cream truck today!”?
My husband once described to someone else that “Joanne practically lives in nostalgia,” and he’s not too far off. Perhaps a gentle jibe (or even a compliment) at my appreciation for sentiment, it’s true that I enjoy spending mental time in the past, re-covering old ground because of its predictability. But is it really that awful to excavate the small moments of one’s past? According to one study, “[n]ostalgia is thought to play an important role in psychological resilience.” Nostalgia can also be an important tool in preserving cultural heritage, particularly for refugees or those of a diaspora. Nostalgia has also been shown to defang, to some degree, negative thinking and the hurts of loneliness.
I do not like change. I do not like disruption. I do not like deviating from documented plans. I do not like deviating from non-documented plans. I like plans. And plans require predictability and the only thing that’s definitely predictable is, of course, history. Nostalgia is, in a way, a study of our personal histories.
What are the artifacts of our past? The items that signal not just the things that happened, but the things that make us feel safe in their happening? For me and Anthony, it was the ice cream truck. For others, it could be a Sony Discman, the frozen tube of orange juice concentrate, Tony the Tiger, a poster of Darth Vader, a Cabbage Patch Kid (my GOD I would have sold my soul for one of those!), a spool of hot pink lanyard. Much like the stones quarried and stacked together to build the pyramids, these relics of the past can build us. Or, at least, a picture of us.
This little snippet from my childhood reveals a lot of things about Joanne–she was rule follower, she grew loud in the face of injustice, she will never, ever, in her entire life ever throw away EVEN ONE PENNY, she was sort of a biotch to her little brother, but she also never took her eyes off him at camp, and indeed, never really took her eyes off him, ever, not when he started school, when he joined her at New Trier, when he began getting into trouble with other kids, not even when he went to college, traveled to Korea to teach English, got married, had a kid, moved to Seattle for his real job…
Of all the things I discerned from this little trip down memory lane, what stands out the most is the fact that however much I tormented him, I loved and love my brother and the instinct to protect him is so bottomless, I can hardly describe it. Because the simple sentence, “I saw an ice cream truck” somehow, inevitably, led me to him.
This week, I’d love for you to think about a random memory from your past: what are some of the things you’d find in your childhood kitchen? Think about a story from that kitchen or an item in that kitchen. And, if you’re so inclined, share it below!
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Parting Thoughts
It feels weird not to say this out loud, so I’ll say it:
By the time you read this email, it will have been days since the United States bombed nuclear sites in Iran, thus entering a military conflict with another sovereign state. I’m not an expert on military or foreign policy matters and I’ve seen enough smart people I genuinely respect quibble over whether this means the U.S. is now “at war.” I hardly think the semantics matter, though, to acknowledge the anxiety that this induces. Indeed, the past several months have delivered a dizzying barrage of crises, and as I described last week, it feels strange and tone-deaf to write about things like ice cream trucks and chocolate chip cookies when our country may be at, or will be at, war.
We come into this world with no stated goals, no ambitions, no passions. These things are written onto us like words on a sheet of paper–sometimes by our parents, our teachers, our friends, books, celebrities, social media. We must choose what we keep on that sheet of paper, what we erase, and what we add–day by day. When I think back on the choices I’ve made over the past few decades, it seems all I’ve ever wanted was to build a small life for myself. Find a person I love. Buy a nice house. Fill it, wall-to-wall, with books. Go for long walks as dusk settles around us, draws us in and smothers us with its quiet promise. I have many of these things (still need to buy the house with wall-to-wall bookshelves), and yet, I don’t feel quite like I fit into this small life I’ve made. I wonder, sometimes, if it’s because I don’t have children and momentarily envy those that have created, literally, such anchors in their existence, the loves that keep them moored in a way that my love for Anthony may never adequately replicate.
However remote those nuclear sites may be, they can never be far enough away to remind us how fragile these things are, what a gift it actually is for me to be sitting here today reminiscing about the time my brother threw a handful of coins into the trash bin at Terminal Park, how much that little boy now reminds me of my nephew, Liam, while then thinking about whether my life will be as full as it could be without children of my own. Regret can be bitter, but it can only be felt at the backend of a life, lived, after all.
Wishing you all the best,
-Joanne
