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Sunday, February 11, 2018

Sum It Up Sunday-Here's The Scoop


Ice cream evokes many emotions for me. It isn't just a sweet thing to have on a hot summers day, or after dinner, or by the pint as you binge-watch Altered Carbon... not that I did that, I'm just sayin...

For the Clarke Clan ice cream was a big deal. Our mom wouldn't let us have it unless we were ALL good. All 6 of us. Do you have any idea how hard that is? Our oldest was only 7 years older than the youngest, so it wasn't like he was leading us with his maturity. Rather, he and the second oldest were the ones who planned, organized and executed the shenanigans we got into.

Like I said, we rarely had ice cream. This was such a big deal, that old neighbors of ours remember this rule some 40+ years down the line.


Every two weeks my mom would take us shopping, dropping the majority of us nitwits off at our Aunt Mimi and Uncle Don's, while she took two of us with her to the store. (Remember those shenanigans I was talking about? Picture six kids in a grocery store playing basketball with the balls from the big wire basket display. Now picture the carnage when said basket breaks. Hence the "only two go with her" rule.)

If 4 of us had been good for Mimi and Don and 2 of us had been good for Mom we would stop at Dairy Queen on the way home. A big if.

The Old Bird would never tell us if she had decided to stop- either she turned or we just kept on driving by.

Somehow we decided that we could influence her, not by asking or pleading, but more subliminally, because we were sooo smart. The old Brady Bunch Grocery Getting Station Wagon had a turn signal that was very loud when activated. As we approached Dairy Queen on our left, we would begin to quietly chant "blinka blinka...blinka blinka..", hoping that this would awaken the "turn left" response in our mother's brains, bring us into the Dairy Queen parking lot and enable us to partake in the sweet, cool, creaminess that a medium cone (never allowed bigger) or Dilly Bar (never allowed a banana split) are made of.
I'd say 9 times out of 1000 we were successful. But ooooh those 9 times.

The ice cream memories associated with my aunt and uncle don't stop there. We knew when we were at their house we could have treats that were unheard of at our own. They raised 6 kids as well (Irish Catholics don't ya know) who were about 10 years older than we were. And since they had an empty nest, they moved my Gram Clarke in with them.

Whenever Mimi and Don would head out to visit one of their brood they would call on my sister and I to Gram sit while they were gone. We were only 7 or 8 years old, but Gram wasn't incapacitated. And she loved to take an afternoon nap. Which meant Katie and I were left to our own devices for a few hours.


We could take the cash that they had left for us and trip down the street to Friendly's where we would share a Jim Dandy between us. Or we could dive into the downstairs freezer to build our own. I swear they had every topping you could think of in their fridge. The chocolate syrup that turns into a hard shell, maraschino cherries, butterscotch syrup...you get the idea.

There it is, The Jim Dandy in all its glory!

Years later Mimi and Don found small scraps of paper from when we would play Ice Cream Parlor on their back porch. The paper was from the ice cream orders that we wrote down. We took these things very seriously you see.

Mimi is now 91 years old and can still polish off an ice cream cone or sundae without blinking an eye.

As can the oldest, you know, the not so mature leader of all shenanigans.

So, for me ice cream means family, laughter (and I guess being good)... but I'm an adult now so I can have it even when I'm bad... like when I've binge-watched Altered Carbon.... just sayin...


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