ice cream

this is the first of several adventures in the homeland.  it is not the first one that happened, just the first one i got pinned down.

if you are not from the homeland, anderson's ice cream means nothing to you, but i will tell you now that mr. john f. kennedy, among many fancy folks, thought it was good ice cream. i spent a fine part of my ice-creamy childhood summers sitting under a photo showing dennis weaver, cone in hand, laughing with a scoop-wielding ray anderson. you can't argue with john kennedy and dennis weaver.

until well after i left the homeland, anderson's lived out on main just past the giant bass at southtown and while they offered cones of soft-serve ice cream in vanilla, chocolate or swirl, you could also find just about an fancy flavor hard-packed ice cream you could want and the folks at anderson's had the ability to pack more ice cream into a cone than anywhere else. dense, dense stuff, that ice cream.

as children, we went there most with the grandparents, people whose job it was to spoil us, people who would say yes to any hot fudge sundae request. ray himself, son of the original owners, would hand over a cone, smiling, paper hatted. he always seemed thrilled to be offering up something that made people happy.

in college, we went there in clusters of ten or so when we were feeling unmoored, lost in our attempts at adult life. we'd wrap ourselves in the familiar- the huge glass windows under carnival neon lights, ray's white hat and apron, tubs of ice cream that never wavered- the same chocolatey chocolate and pistochioey pistachio my senior year of college as they were the last summer days before i went to kindergarten.

when anderson's closed more than ten years ago, i felt a tug, a little emptiness, even though i hadn't had that ice cream in a very long time. many of the anchors of my memory disappeared while i was gone away and i did not always notice at first. we are like that, all of us. raring to grow up and get out of a place, but expecting what we leave behind to stay still for us, waiting, like a photograph. we are indignant when our old world moves on, grows up, too.

so when the sisters begin sending photos of their children with ice cream and they put the word anderson's there with the photo, i am suspicious. when they say someone has taken ray's recipes and his old soda fountain and machines and has started making ice cream out at the candy house, i nearly faint. because when i say candy house the image in your head of a gingerbready little place out past town where you know elves are living and working is exactly what i mean. the place has been full of chocolate in all forms forever and huge jars of hard candy- rootbeer sticks and cherry sticks and wax tubes full of sugary colored liquid. imagine the source of all your childhood chocolate and the source of all your childhood ice cream moving in together. that's right. the sisters promise we will all go.

we walk in through the front door of the candy house in evening, when the cicadas are at their best, and the smell inside, indescribable but immediately familiar, covers everything. there are smells of chocolate and caramel and nuts and raisins and sassafras and smells i have always known but still cannot name. the smell is of candy you can't buy at a grocery store or at the mall. we walk through a side door and i am standing in a place i would have given anything to get to in my childhood. the ice cream lives in the room that used to be part of the chocolate making, glassed in for viewing. the glass, once smudged with the noseprints of thousands of children, is gone, and an ice cream counter stands where the chocolate making apparatus once waited for us. and i stand there, too, with my sisters and their husbands and the sweetie. we are right there in the chocolate factory. there, behind the low glass case, sit neat rows of ice cream tubs, chocolate, coconut, a glowing blueberry lemon, butter pecan, bubble gum.

the sisters have been telling me this ice cream is the same as they remember. they remind me one of the new owners worked at the original anderson's, that he uses the old equipment and the same ingredients the andersons fed to our grandparents, but i know how people are. they showboat. they can't help it. they will take something simple and lovely and will add to it to make it sassier. they will diminish it. so i walk the length of the counter. i look at every flavor and take my time but i know, even though i look twice, then a third time, slowly, at every tub, what i will get.

and when the man behind the counter asks me, smiling like ray, what i would like, i say i would like a coke float with vanilla ice cream. because there is little else in the world so plain in construction that is also so perfect. he hands me the tall cup heavy with ice cream and the coke foam at the top continues growing in a sparkling column after i take it so that i have to slurp the foam and slurp it again to keep it from overflowing. this is how things should be.

i scoop up some of the vanilla ice cream and the coke has already begun to turn it to crystals. we walk out into the hundred degree evening, three sisters, three husbands, and we sit at a round table filling ourselves with ice cream. and the sisters are right. it is the same ice cream. and maybe i am in college sitting on the curb at the south end of town with a pistachio cone and a skinny bunch of longhaired boys and black fingernailed girls on our way to a pool hall. mabye i am ten, holding the hand of my grandpa while he says the precious words hot fudge sundae and ray nods. maybe i am small enough to be sitting on my dad's shoulders wearing seersucker pajamas my grandma made, the only clothes wearable on such a hot night. it is all the same. i know where i am. i am home.