Ice Cream Stories…

July 16, 2007 /

I saw over on Is My Blog Burning? that one can participate in the For the Love of Ice Cream Challenge, over at YumSugar. You can then blog about ice cream stories, ice cream recipes, favorite flavors, etc. I like ice cream. It’s probably my favorite dessert, in many forms. I like it much better than cake, often more than brownies, and sometimes even better than pie. Actually, I like it WITH pie, but that’s another story.

So, here’s my submission to the challenge. Always looking for blog fodder, and being more willing to humiliate myself in my old age, I will confess to you a tale of my questionable morals and hygene. This is a rash decision on my part, as both my mother and my daughter read my blog. I don’t want my mother to be disappointed in me, and I’m hoping that the statute of limitations has run out on my crime. I don’t want my daughter to follow in my semi-shady footsteps, so I hope she won’t get any smart ideas here. Ahem.

When I was about 10, my mom, my brother, and I all lived with one of my mom’s best friends, Linda, and her daughter, Jennifer, who was 5. We had lived with them for a year or two (3?) in Alaska as well, and Jennifer was as close as I ever got to having a sister until I was 22 and met my half-sisters. Anyway, at this point, I’m 10, Jennifer is 5, and we lived in Stockton, CA, near an Alpha Beta & Thrifty strip mall. In case anyone doesn’t know, Thrifty had (still has, but now they’re Rite Aid) an ice cream counter, where you could get cylinder shaped scoops of ice cream. One scoop for 5 cents, two scoops for 10 cents, and three scoops for 15 cents. The problem is, we sometimes didn’t have money for ice cream, and yet…we really wanted it. One day, Jennifer and I walked to Thrifty to get some ice cream, and she came up with a pretty good scheme. (Now that I’m thinking about it, and remembering that she was only 5, I suspect someone taught her this scheme before, but it was new to me). While I was buying my ice cream, she pretended to have lost money in the gum ball machine, and an employee came over and ‘refunded’ her the nickel. We each had had a nickel to buy ice cream with, and she now had 10 cents. She got her ice cream, and we left to walk home. On the way, I asked her how she had gotten TWO scoops of ice cream, when I only had one. She told me of her scheme, and that she had gotten another nickel out of them, and used it for her second scoop. I was morally indignant (though perhaps just mad that she had more ice cream than I did), and knocked the ice cream cone out of her hand, where gravity took over and flipped the cone upside down, and it landed perfectly upright, with the ice cream on the bottom, the cone on the top. Of course, she was only 5, and started crying. She cried and cried, and I scolded, and she cried some more, and I caved in. I let her pick up the cone, brush off the top part of it, that had touched the ground, and we walked home, with her sniffling and licking her ice cream as we went.

The shameful part of this story, for me, was that the next time I wanted ice cream, but had NO money? Jennifer and I went to Thrifty, and did the trick all over again, choosing the machine that took dimes, so we would have enough for us each to have a scoop. Thankfully, we were smart enough to know that we couldn’t try that trick too often, because the employees would catch on pretty quickly, so we only tried it a few times that summer, always with different employees on duty.  Eventually we gave it up, but it has always remained in my memory as a shameful part of my past.

So that’s my ice cream story.   Anyone else want to play?

13 Comments

  • Ml

    July 16, 2007 at 7:09 am

    You were only 10, J, so I wouldn’t worry about it 😉 For a 5 year old to figure out how to get more money is pretty darn smart!!

  • Maya's Granny

    July 16, 2007 at 9:39 am

    Oh, the things your children do and don’t tell you about until decades later! Thank heavens your grandmother doesn’t read my blog, is all I can say.

  • Riley

    July 16, 2007 at 10:51 am

    Way to fight the ice cream system!

    When I first moved to California, my in-laws, all natives to Cali, went on and on about Thrifty ice cream and I dared to say “what exactly IS Thrifty ice cream?” because my only experience with the word Thrifty was Thrifty Maid brand food that my dad always bought at the grocery store because it was cheap. Needless to say, they drove me to the nearest Rite Aid immediately. I admit, the ice cream gun scoop thingy is pretty cool.

  • kookiejar

    July 16, 2007 at 11:21 am

    You guys really stuck it to the man (the ice cream man, that is). That’s very funny. I wish we could get a scoop or two for under a quarter nowadays. That would be the only thing I’d eat!

  • Lalunas

    July 16, 2007 at 11:35 am

    Well, that was interesting. She was a smart cookie.
    We used to find bottles(CRV)and turn them in for money and buy candy. Ice cream was more expensive. I had to baby sit to get money for that one..

  • Starshine

    July 16, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    I was at Baskin-Robbins a couple nights ago and saw a 5 year old with a freshly scooped cone and commented to my husband that they boy looked the perfect age to be enjoying an icecream cone. Of course, as an adult, I still love icecream. But there is something about being a child and the ability to enjoy a cone that pair so well together!

    About the shame factor, we all have those things from our past. Thank God we’re forgiven!