Call Me Wistful

There was no such thing as lactose intolerance in the ‘50s, but now I eat ice cream advisedly and sparingly, always aware that there might be a price to pay if I eat too much of it. Still the aftertaste of the melting, sweet goop continues to occupy my daydreams. When I was a girl in New York, there was no Good Humor man in a truck. There was instead an old guy in a white coat, the dentist’s alterego, who wheeled his pushcart down into the playground in Riverside Park, ringing his bell to alert the children on the seesaws and monkey bars that the time for smudged shirts and sticky fingers was at hand. There was the soda jerk in the candy store on 81st street who reached his scoop and much of his upper body way down into the tubs of butter pecan to make me a cone, turning it upside down to dip it in chocolate sprinkles. There were the tortonis and spumonis that tempered the garlicky food in the Italian restaurants. And most memorably, there was the counter at Schrafft’s where I sat with my mother swinging my Mary Janes from a precariously high perch waiting for my hot fudge sundae.

Sometimes, the cold stuff would make my teeth hurt and send an electric shock through my head, but overall when I reflect on ice cream, my heart fills with gladness and I think back on joyous occasions with my grandchildren many decades later. Cones and scoops and toppings and sundaes never get old. They’re part of the inheritance we pass down like certain story books and parlor games long after we stopped having parlors to sit in. I share with my grandsons, now almost sixteen and twenty, the lingering pleasure of summer afternoons at Izzy’s in St. Paul before it went out of business during the pandemic. We had to settle for those old lefties Ben and Jerry last week but the boys didn’t mind, each of them tackling his double scoop with unwavering focus and fierce determination. I maintained my self-control and just tasted a teeny bit of Chocolate Therapy with that little wooden spoon. But then I got sad. Out of nowhere, something hollowed out inside of me. It was a dizzying, disorienting feeling.

I got sad because the boys had become old. I’ve gotten old, too of course, but it wasn’t so much about that. It was about making grown-up conversation with them instead of recklessly planting kisses on their faces, covered in sweet goodness. It was about the impulse to dip a napkin in water to try to clean it off their noses. The older one asked the younger one what he knew about social credit scores in China. This is what I have to deal with. They are almost fully grown and careening out into the world without me. They are leaving me behind, as they should. I don’t remember feeling wistful when their father was that age. I was very involved with his “success” and felt all puffed-up and excited for him when he flew to Japan for a year at the same age my older grandson is now. I was oriented towards his future. But this may be where my own aging comes in. Mortality is whispering to me and letting me know in myriad ways that I won’t witness the fullness of my grandsons’ ripening, the long arc of their futures. I don’t expect to see them become fathers themselves.

Wistfulness is elusive. It carries with it a sense of longing, of yearning for something that you can no longer hold in your hand, sand sifting through your fingers, melted ice cream running down your arm. Being wistful is a contemplative state that remains fuzzy at the margins. It feels weightless, insubstantial. It’s hard to get a handle on it. I know I have no choice but to let the cotton candy of their little boyhoods with its crayoned drawings and races down the driveway fly off and dissipate, but I catch myself wanting to fix them with adhesive where they were ten years ago. I want to trap them in albums, the old fashioned kind with prints held down at the corners. But no. I will grow older, baruch ha-shem, and they will grow old and their father will grow old and we will all leave our scent on one another in passing like dogs in the park.

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