The Ice Cream Truck

By Jane Farrell

In the Midwest, summer nights are long – the light really doesn’t disappear until after 9 p.m. That gives Liz the ice cream lady a few extra post-dinner hours to travel our well-groomed neighborhood in her battered truck that carries everything from toffee bars ($2.50) to cotton candy pops ($1) that I’ve never had the nerve to try.

Liz didn’t make an appearance until about a year ago, when her truck rounded the corner on a Friday night, playing a familiar jingle. She’d stop by the corner and wait until someone appeared. At first, that was only me – going for the Blue Bunny ice cream sandwich, naturally. (When it comes to ice cream, I have no shame.) After I bought my treat, she’d wait a few minutes and then move off, her truck disappearing into the gathering twilight, its jingle growing fainter.

I felt bad that I was the only customer in the neighborhood, and I wondered if she’d even be back this summer. But sure enough, her truck materialized again, and this time there were two new families with an assortment of kids playing baseball on their lawns with plastic bats and balls.

It took a few tries for them to get their parents to approach the truck. This is, after all, the era of limited treats for kids, at least in my neck of the woods. Then Liz had seven customers instead of one, and soon after that the line grew to eleven as the moms and dads started to think that a lower-fat vanilla bar wasn’t such a bad idea. One night Liz even ran out of cotton candy pops.

Through it all, she was as patient and courteous as she had been when I was her only customer, especially when one of the kids took what seemed like forever to decide what she wanted. The other kids, unfortunately, weren’t as patient, shuffling their feet and emitting exasperated sighs. The parents became better acquainted as they stood on line, exchanging tips on lawn mowers and snow blowers. Liz offered them a few tips of her own.

A third family moved in and saw the truck for the first time. “How nostalgic!” the husband exclaimed. And it was and it wasn’t. When I was growing up in New York City, the Good Humor Man (also known as Steve) came around every single night. In those crowded city streets, it wasn’t hard to find customers, and parents were less worried about treats in those days.

But our neighborhood wasn’t diverse; here, kids of different backgrounds and colors line up for Liz and her goodies. In some ways things are still the same, and in other ways they’ve changed for the better. Norman Rockwell’s America still exists, but it’s changed in a way that the painter, who chronicled civil rights and poverty as well as boys in barbershop chairs, would be glad to see.

Happy summer, America. Enjoy your ice cream!