The Take-Away

What happened this evening after dinner: I suggested that we take a walk, all six of us (including the dogs) to the corner of 18th Street and 6th Avenue, where I happened to know a Mr. Softee ice cream truck was parked. Lily wanted to take her scooter, and because I knew Annika would be upset to be scooterless, in spite of her total lack of ability to scooter, I got the doll stroller for her to push, and everybody put their shoes back on, and we clicked the leashes onto the dogs' collars, and we set out into the lovely spring evening. And then the fun really began. Lily, totally oblivious to pedestrians, almost careened into half a dozen of them; Annika, who is, to be fair, only 19 months old, set the pace at about a block per fifteen minutes. If you don't know New York City blocks, this is not fast. The dogs, confused by the cluster of us and the squeals of excitement and the near-constant near-collisions, peed randomly and frequently on every object on the sidewalk, and Scout--poor, neurotic, rescued Scout--barked crazily and nonsensically at a fuzzy, foolish-looking, pincushion of a dog who was actually wearing a windbreaker. By the time we arrived at the ice cream truck, it was midnight, and the truck had gone home for the night. No, it was still there, and it wasn't too late, and the girls were so happy with their small cones of soft-serve that I almost forgot the dozen near-lawsuits that had occurred en route, and stood on the corner watching them lick joyfully, not think, I swear it, of all of the laundry each lick would entail, just of their joy. And then, the walk back, on which Ben and I had to control both dogs while holding a scooter and a stroller, while ensuring that our two slow, now chocolate-covered walkers did not get hit by cars, knocked to the ground by larger people or have their ice cream stolen by the previously mentioned canine members of the group. Annika stopped, only to wipe her runny nose on my freshly dry-cleaned suede jacket. Lily walked into a mailbox while trying to isolate a piece of chocolate coating from her cone. Annika walked even more slowly than before, with the newfound focus of the ice cream, and both wanted to push the stroller while eating it, and realized she could not, causing occasional tears of frustration, stopped only by another joyful lick. Lily drew unnecessary attention to us when the dogs finally did their real business. The word "stinky" was shouted several times before the threat of a Mr. Softee veto was invoked. And when we reached the door, loud and sticky and stinky and snotty and tired, our gay neighbor who was waiting for the elevator took one look at us and said, "Oh, you straights. I am so, so sorry for you sometimes." I won't even go into the effort it took to finish the ice creams, deposit the ends of the cones in the trash cans, fend off a temper tantrum and a pajama rejection, with the dogs barking behind the locked bedroom door, because it doesn't seem necessary. But this does. 

What I, what we, will remember of this night (without pre-reading this, of course) in twenty years, or more: a rare family walk to the ice cream truck on one of the first lovely spring evenings of the year. The joy.