Ice Cream

When I was much younger, my grandparents lived in the small town of Susquehanna, which was about twenty minutes away from Binghamton, the decaying metropolis where I grew up. It was always a difficult trip to make, because my grandmother had developed dementia when I was a toddler, and she had forgotten my name, my father’s name, and had likely forgotten her own as well. Their house had a very unique sense of having been left behind, somewhere in the past, and it felt like stepping into a different reality every time we visited.

Still, I loved going on these day trips, not least of all because we would always stop at a small, family-run ice cream shop on the way out of town – a thank you to my mother and I for putting up with my father’s difficult family as much as we did.

The ice cream at this shop was mediocre at best, but the good thing about it was that they had straws in the shape of glasses. I’m not sure why, but in my childhood I had a strange fascination with people who wore glasses. I think I was following the old axiom that people who wore glasses were more intelligent, or something along those lines, and I always wanted to seem more intelligent. Due to this, I always ordered some type of unnaturally colored drink which came with transparent, plastic glasses which I could attempt to mold to my face. They never fit, and I always looked extremely silly, but I can’t remember being happier with anything.

By the time I began to get a little older, I would still always beg to stop here whenever we were in Susquehanna, although our visits became much rarer and nearly non-existent after my grandmother’s death and my grandfather’s move out of the area.

The visits were pretty much over by the time I was about seven, so ice cream glasses are always something which I associate with my very early childhood. Although now that I’ve grown up a bit and wear glasses for more legitimate reasons, they’re not as much of a necessity in my search to feel intelligent. I’ve also grown up enough to realize that your intelligence is not necessarily aligned with how weak or strong your eyesight is.

While this memory is directly related to my grandmother’s decline, it also, in an almost poetic way, directly relates to my early growth. When one world ends, another always begins. This is true of societies, lives, even eyesight and the need for glasses – whether they are used to drink milkshakes or used to magnify letters and words.