Ice Cream, Man!

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Sep 16, 2009 9:20PM

It was around 8 p.m. Labor Day when we heard the familiar jingle ringing down the street. And if you grew up hearing the Mister Softee song, you know it's unmistakable. 'Course, being 40 we just couldn't run out of the house barefoot and shirtless trying to catch up to the truck with five dollars we took from Mom's purse before asking. We had to don shoes and leash the dog. Emmy's 10 and doesn't run anywhere anymore. We were thinking this was going to be a futile endeavor.

Turned out that the truck stopped a few houses down. Also, while it was playing the Mister Softee jingle, it wasn't a Mister Softee truck. It probably was a Mister Softee truck at one time, but now it was "Carlos' [sic] Ice Cream." And just like every ice cream truck in existence, he kept the goddamn music going even as a line started to form. Which meant we all had to shout over the music to give Carlos our orders.

Slightly crestfallen at the joke played on our childhood memory, we ordered a Boston shake, partly out of nostalgia, partly out of spite. Then we took a sip of the Boston Shake and were taken back to the Northwest Side, 1977.

That Boston shake was as good as we remembered. Suddenly, we didn't care that this was a an ice cream man who drove a chariot of lies. Sine Emmy was leashed, we took her for her evening walk, savoring every sip of that shake, the jingle burning its melody in our ice cream headache-suffering brain.