Soft Serve

When people talk about the past, they’ll often say, “It was a simpler time.” I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe we forget the more complicated parts, and that makes the past seem more simple. If a writer is talking about their own childhood, then it often was a simpler time because their parents took care of the complicated stuff.

For those of us who grew up in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, I don’t think our parents had a very simple time at all. The Supreme Court upended everything the South believed about segregation. The South didn’t take it very well.

Somebody kilt the president, then they kilt the man who kilt him, then they kilt his brother. None of that is very simple. Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers were killed for being black. Some boys in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were killed for trying to help black folks.

The Russians put missiles in Cuba that could easily have landed in Mississippi. We got them to back off that, and they started keeping them on submarines where we never knew where they were. Bombs kept getting more and more powerful until we invented one that killed people, but not real estate.

Israel and Egypt went to war. Then Israel and Lebanon. Then, the puppet we installed in Iran because we thought he replaced a guy who wanted to nationalize the Iranian oil fields was ousted by a bunch of religious extremists. At least, we thought they were extremists, but now, they seem kind of in the middle of the road.

Apollo 13 failed. Skylab’s solar array failed. The Space Program proved too expensive to continue going to the moon, so we invented a low-earth orbit reusable vehicle.

The President of the United States resigned rather than be impeached.

If you’re eight years old, you might be aware of all that, but it doesn’t complicate your life. If you’re trying to raise an eight-year-old in 1970, it complicates your life quite a bit.

There used to be a man who drove from neighborhood to neighborhood selling ice cream. He had a van, and in the van, there was a soft-serve ice cream machine, and that was his entire product line. You could get chocolate or vanilla, or a combination of the two, depending on the lever on the front of the machine. Soft-Serve Ice Cream in a cone cost a quarter.

Nobody knew the man’s name. His van was pretty old. He was friendly, though. They said he fought in the war. In those days, everybody fought in the war. There were three to choose from. Based on his age, I’d say it was Korea.

Sometimes, you’ll notice people who have really short thumbnails. They’re otherwise perfectly normal, but the nail on their thumb is shorter than the others. I never knew what sort of life somebody could have selling ice cream around Jackson, one quarter at a time, but he did it for quite a while.

Our house was on the corner of Meadowbrook, which is a pretty busy street, and Honeysuckle, which is a pretty quiet street. The Ice Cream man would park his old van right in front of our house and play “Pop Goes the Weasel” on what sounded like an army surplus loudspeaker, the kind Radar O’Riley used to announce incoming wounded on M*A*S*H. It didn’t sound much like music but brought kids out from every corner. “MOM! I GOTTA HAVE A QUARTER!”

Sometimes, he would stop by school just as we were getting out. He was kind of sheepish about it, which made me wonder if anybody asked him not to since it kind of interrupted the after-school carpool pick-up scene. Every so often, I’d see a teacher or a Janitor get in line for a cone. Who doesn’t like ice cream?

Soft-serve ice cream is made in a machine invented by god knows who. The mix either came liquid in a carton or powdered in a box. Anything made of milk dehydrates very easily. That’s why they make protein powder from it. If you turned the handle right, it served vanilla; if you turned it left, it served chocolate; if you lifted it up in the middle, you got a mix. That’s all there was to it. You got a quarter, you got ice cream.

Dairy Queen now serves hamburgers and stuff, but there was a time when all they had was ice cream, and most of that was soft serve. They were proud of the little curl at the tip of the cone they tried to teach their employees to make. You could dip your Dairy Queen soft-serve ice cream cone into this chocolate stuff, and it made a hard shell. “Blizzards” and " Milkshakes are made from their soft-serve machine.

Sometimes, women, especially young women, like to test the limits of your devotion. I used to know a girl from the Delta who had peculiar eating habits and terrible migraines. There were times when the only thing that would make her feel better was for me to drive to Sonic and get her a corn dog, then drive to Dairy Queen, in another part of town, and get what they call a “Dilly Bar” which is factory packaged soft-serve ice cream on a stick surrounded by the Dairy Queen chocolate stuff. You’d be surprised how often she got what she wanted.

As you get older, you eat a lot less soft-serve ice cream. The man in the van quit coming around. I have no idea what happened to him. And then, you go to college, and in college, you eat at the cafeteria, and you’d be surprised how often the cafeteria comes equipped with a soft-serve ice cream machine.

At Millsaps College, Tommy Ranager was in charge of recruiting football and baseball players. He was pretty good at it and had a regular routine. He tried to time campus tours so that they ended in the cafeteria, where the prospect met the other boys on the team, and coach Ranager proudly showed off our soft-serve ice cream machine. For a nineteen-year-old catcher who used to be an eight-year-old with a bunch of quarters, knowing that you can get as much soft-serve as you want for free is probably a pretty good selling point.

Every so often, I’ll see a guy with an even older van trying to sell ice cream around Jackson. Times are different, and people are less likely to accept a stranger selling to children in their neighborhood. When you consider all the dangers we faced as kids, a guy in a van is pretty much nothing compared to a Russian with a missile.

I don’t know if times were simpler, or if we wanted them to be simpler, or we have this weird desire to be afraid of the world we live in now. I don’t know of many things that would please me as much as hearing the Army surplus loudspeaker playing that song and knowing I had a quarter.