I hesitate to say what follows at all. Doing so might be ultimately cause Murphy (of Murphy’s Law) to rain down such a painful punishment upon me that I might never get “Turkey in the straw” or “The entertainer” out of my head ever again. My neighborhood is not a heavily populated one. Acreages mostly. Nevertheless, each and every summer has brought a plague of ice cream trucks upon us. This year, however, the swarm has not yet invaded my neighborhood at all. I’ve heard one, and that was only for a brief period of time, and on a long weekend. We’ve had hot sunny weather for quite a while, hardly any rain compared to usual, and still there is a definite dearth of ice cream trucks. I am not complaining mind you, I hate the four wheeled beasts in every way. As a child I wasn’t allowed to indulge in such things as ice cream truck consumerism. The lack of such things in my life was under the dubious guise of what I now believe to be largely parentally imagined food allergies. So the sound of horrific jingles ringing through my neighborhood did not suggest dessert, it merely reminded me of the lack thereof. So I was left to stew over the horrific songs that came with them. Over and over and over and over. Sometimes more than one truck per day. It was awful.
A few years ago, away from the parental neighborhood (and long since free of externally imposed food restrictions), I decided to indulge myself for the first time in the sinful products the dreaded four wheeled beasts had to offer. This was unmistakably, undeniably, the WORST ice cream I had ever tasted. Even the gallon/4 liter bucket of no name brand ice cream at UnSafewayTM could not compare to such low quality, yet expensive slop. Of course, I have become a bit of an ice cream fascist since I now make my own from scratch. My recipe is a closely guarded secret, and is no longer written down anywhere. I have only told it to one person in its entirety.
Now that I have made the observation that there haven’t been any ice cream trucks in the neighborhood this year…. I fear that I might have tempted Murphy to release the cold, unfeeling, frozen hordes in my direction. I will wake up tomorrow and the entire Vancouver fleet of trucks will be screaming their way down my street – causing all the whiny children within earshot to begin pestering their parents for change. I will only derive satisfaction from this if they are playing “Helter skelter” or something equally appropriate. Wouldn’t that be something.