I took my kids out to get soft-serve ice cream cones, in mid-day blistering heat, as a reward for my daughter’s endurance (and struggle with such endurance, thus her siblings’ likewise tolerance) of her second blood draw in a week.
It’s a school day, so everyone else at her school is enduring the heat and humidity with fun and games (or so I imagine) outdoors. She can’t go to school, though, and neither can her brother, which is related to the blood draw, but I don’t really want to talk about that. Except that I do, but I won’t.
Instead I’ve been focusing on the minutiae, and trying not to ask too many broad, philosophical questions, to spare myself from the kind of deep thinking that ordinarily gets me into trouble. Trouble like questioning how virulent microbes really work, and the real meaning of health and how to attain it. But I digress. I wasn’t going to talk about that.
Minutiae such as what to offer for lunch provide just as challenging cognitive opportunities. Is there enough bread for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to feed the family? Does anyone in the family like peanut butter anymore? (Apparently not.) What shall I serve as an alternative? Indeed, such conundrums keep me perplexed for days. And days have I had to be perplexed wondering what to serve for lunch, since we have been under quarantine for nearly a week now. There I go again. I wasn’t going to discuss this.
Skipping all of that stuff about thought—we went out for our blood draw, the “convalescent” draw as opposed to the “acute” draw (the latter turned up a negative, meaning: health, yet we have to go through the “convalescent” draw to confirm such assumption of health), and then we went out for soft-serve ice cream. Yes, this is where I started.
One bubblegum. One coconut. One coffee. For me, black raspberry, my favorite. This place has something like 30 flavors of soft-serve, although today there were several covered up with blue electrical tape, so it was more like 17 flavors. Plenty enough to keep us happy.
The tiny shop was stiflingly oven-hot, with no fan, so we went out to the merely meltingly hot parking lot to eat our treats. A narrow band of shade was available on one side of a plastic picnic table. We settled down there, my youngest child nestling close, nearly on my lap, with his ice cream cone threatening to dribble all over both of us.
The ice-cream-melt vs. human slurp factor race was on. I tried to demonstrate to three children (for seemingly the hundredth time) how one goes about keeping an ice cream cone from melting itself all over one’s hand. There is a technique involved, turning the cone in your hand at the same time as you tilt your head just so. Some get it quickly, others do not. My children are of the latter variety. Although as they get older, they get a half a percentage point better at this.
My youngest, though—the one practically in my lap—had no time to figure this out, for he must have nudged his ice cream right off the top of the cone. Or something. He somehow managed to lose the whole thing right out of his hand. First it smeared itself upside-down all over the front of his shirt and shorts, and then it landed, cone-up, on the asphalt underneath the plastic picnic table.
I gave this a half-second’s moment of consideration, then reached under and grabbed the cone. There was not much left of the ice cream—most of it was now a pink miniature of glacier-melting. I licked what was left to clean it up, lest it contain asphalt chunks. I did not care if it contained asphalt chunks.
I handed the cone back to my son wordlessly. The other kids were giggling and saying something. I do not remember what they said. Maybe I made up the giggles. All I could think was, Do I get him another cone? Or do I make him cope with it like it is? Dropping it was pretty annoying. A two-year-old, now I can understand that. They don’t know how to hold things well. A five-year-old should just be able to manage this, and he didn’t. I don’t want to reward that. But is that cruel of me? I want to be loving and flexible, but I don’t want to reward clumsiness or foolishness. Instead I want him to figure out that when you drop your cone, you sort of don’t get to eat all of it anymore.
He did not ask for another cone. I did not offer. He simply proceeded to eat what was left. The other kids proceeded to race the dribbles of ice cream slithering across their little balled-up fists.