The Cranky Old Ice Cream Man

A little more than two blocks from where I grew up was a Baskin Robbins ice cream store. Two blocks beyond that was Cutler Park, a small park where my friends and I would go to play –depending on the season– football or baseball. Both the store and the park were on the other side of a busy street from my house, so I started going there around the age of seven when my parents figured I had enough common sense to cross the busy street without getting run over.

An old fellow ran the Baskin Robbins store. He wore a kind of classic milkman/soda jerk outfit: white shoes, white pants, a crisp white short sleeve shirt, and a small white, paper garrison hat. The man was thin and old with little grey puffs of hair sticking out of his ears; over the course of prying thousands and thousands of ice cream scoops out of the hard-packed tubs he had developed ropey muscles on his liver-spotted forearm that sported a blurred tattoo. He would flip up the clear cover, grab the metal scoop out of a little water bucket, hit it twice on a sponge of dubious cleanliness, lean into the freezer bin and, wasting not a single fleck of ice cream, twist out a tight, perfect little sphere of ice cream.

The Baskin Robbins’ drinking fountain was the only source of water when we spent hours of hard play at the park. Before the age of seven when I went into the store with my parents or visiting relatives, the old man was always professional, bordering on obsequious, the very picture of customer service. After I started going with my friends to the park, he would yell at us in his thick German accent whenever we came in to get a drink of water after a hot afternoon of playing football. Given my limited frame of reference, I thought he was one of the crankiest people I had ever met. His Jekyll and Hyde customer facing skills shocked me.

All of our fathers had fought in WWII and, by proxy, we had an instinctive –or at least media-driven– distrust of people with German accents. I am sure our fathers would not have agreed with this position. Soon this group of kids I hung out with started referring to him as ‘the mean old German guy’.

Baskin Robbins used to have a promotion to where you would fill out a card with your birth date, and they would send you a coupon around your birthday for a free ice cream cone. I really liked my birthdays and I would take that coupon in to redeem with a little secret sense of pride and accomplishment for having had a birthday. The mean old German guy would look at it suspiciously like I was trying to pass a forged $20 bill. He would then –grudgingly– serve me one of his perfect little frozen spheres.

This was how I had pigeon-holed this fellow during my childhood. He was mean, he was cheap, and he disliked children. Sometime in early high school he must have retired or died because I never saw him again. I never really gave him much of a second thought either.

When I was a senior in high school I was dating a girl from my history class. She was Jewish. One of the assignments for class was to see the movie Judgment at Nuremberg. Up until that moment I had never been consciously aware of the Holocaust. Now, sitting in this darkened theater with my girlfriend quietly sobbing beside me holding my hand in a death grip as we watched historical footage of concentration camps, it hit me that these were her people who had been systematically murdered. She shared a cultural and genetic heritage with those humans whose bodies were being bulldozed into open pits. It was tangibly real to her. From that point forward, I began to take notice of references to the Holocaust.

A few months later I saw a close-up photograph of numbers tattooed on the arm of a concentration camp inmate. It triggered a memory from childhood, and suddenly I knew where I had seen such a tattoo; a tattoo that a pressed, white, short-sleeve shirt could not cover. I found myself recalibrating my assessment of the cranky old German guy at Baskin Robbins. I also experienced a wave of guilt for thinking so many unkind thoughts about this man. Here was a fellow who had probably been in his 30s during the collapse of the German economy; no wonder he was frugal. He then saw that same economic collapse bring Hitler to power. I cannot imagine what this man must have suffered and lost. I think it would have embittered me too.

I was a pretty good kid. Even so, my little group of friends and I had some childish prejudice going against this man because of his accent. Sort of like an old enemy of our fathers might be an enemy of ours too. Ironic, because this man suffered more at the hands of the Nazis than did any of our fathers who actually fought in the war. Even today I feel a lingering sense of guilt.

People are not necessarily what I first judge them to be; this is a lesson I continually relearn. If I had a time machine that gave me do-overs, I would go back and try to get to know this skinny old man with a temper. I am sure he had stories to tell. I might even talk him into giving me a job so I too could learn to create, without waste, tight little frozen spheres that people desired to eat on their birthday.

Why I Stay Home New Year's Eve

I’ve learned not trust New Year's Eve. 

It did not start that way. As a child I really wanted to participate in the festivities; the only problem was it required staying up until midnight to really celebrate. My parents were all about having grownup time under the guise of children needing their sleep. It looked like a cool celebration from the old movies. Everybody would drink and dance to a live band wearing party hats. At the stroke of midnight all the women got kissed and they sang Auld Lang Syne. Whatever, it looked pretty exciting.

I have a pretty vivid memory of the first New Year's Eve when I was awake. I was eight years old. I convinced my parents to let me stay up with my older sister to celebrate. I was not sure what celebrate –given my old movie frame of reference– meant, but I was ready. With huge anticipation I saw the clock march far later into the evening than I had ever seen it. Growing up in New Mexico we were able to watch the lighted ball fall in New York a full two hours before midnight. It was odd seeing the moment pass for a city 2000 miles away and full of strangers. Everyone on television was so excited about something that was as near as I could tell a monster bore. Finally, the hands on the antique mantle clock in our own time zone crept towards the vertical. I kept calling the local time and temperature so I would know the exact time. About ten minutes to midnight, the time and temperature number hit a solid busy signal from everyone else doing the same thing. My sister brought out a little party horn and a spinning noise maker. When the clock struck midnight we ran outside, blew the little horn, spun the noisemaker, and screamed “Happy New Year!!” at the top of our lungs. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but nothing happened. The instant passed and we were into the next year. It was even less interesting than what I had seen happen in New York two hours previously. My eyes felt gritty, my vocal chords were blown, and a wave of disappointment passed over me. Clearly I had unrealistic expectations and was expecting something would actually happen. Something like feeling the earth click as it passed this cosmic milepost in its yearly orbit. Whatever it was, between the fatigue and the anticlimax I suffered a tangible letdown.

It was the next New Year’s I got my first taste of the evil that lurks, if not in the holiday, then in the hearts of men in the holiday. I don’t remember that New Year's Eve, but I do remember the next morning. My father was up early scanning the paper with a grim look on his face. He said on the way home from their New Year’s party he and my mother had passed a bad car accident, a really bad accident. A drunk had plowed into another car and killed the couple in the other car. It turns out that the couple had been the parents of one of my elementary school classmates.  My father said if he and my mother had left the party a few minutes earlier the drunk would have hit them. David, my classmate was out for many days. He then moved in with his grandmother. None of the kids at school knew what to say to him and he was exceptionally quiet for the remainder of the school year. This also marked the point when my parents stopped going out on New Year's Eve.

Even in college I tended to stay home on New Year's Eve. The city just felt unsafe. After college graduation, my wife and I moved to California when I got my first job in the Silicon Valley. We had some very good friends there named Ken and Leslie. Ken and Leslie had a little two story condo in Mountain View and enjoyed entertaining. They convinced us to join them for a quiet New Year's Eve party for just the four of us. Indeed it was a good time; we played cards and at midnight we toasted the coming year. We were upstairs in their den about a minute into the New Year when a loud THUMP came from the next room. The sound was hard to identify, but it was clearly inside the house. We looked at each other, put down our glasses and went into the next room which was the master bedroom. At first we saw nothing unusual, and then we looked in the walk-in closet. There, right in the middle of the floor lying on the carpet, ten feet from where we had been sitting was a perfect, spent 45 caliber slug with scattered sheet rock dust around it and a tuft of pink insulation. There was a hole in the closet ceiling. Evidently, a mile or so away, some liquored-up yahoo in lieu of firecrackers had pulled out their .45 and popped off a couple of shots into the sky. When the bullet finally fell, it knocked through the cedar shakes on the roof, the sheet of plywood they were nailed to, the ceiling insulation, and finally the sheetrock of the ceiling. If you were outside and that came down on your head, you likely would not survive. It gave me the willies. Maybe that was the cosmic click I had been looking for when I was seven. We left shortly thereafter and went straight home.

Fast forward one year. Ken and Leslie had moved to an apartment in Palo Alto. They invited us up for New Year’s and said it was a better neighborhood and that bullet had been a fluke the previous year. Since I try to avoid personal superstition and be rational, I let them convince me to for us to come over again on New Year’s. Once again a nice night of playing cards, and around midnight we again toasted the New Year. You could hear the firecrackers popping around the neighborhood so we went out on the balcony of their second floor apartment to soak it in. We had been out there perhaps a minute when we heard something come ripping through the leaves of the tree next to us and slap into the ground, again about ten feet away from where we were standing. This sound was not hard to identify, it was clearly a heavy bullet falling out of the sky. We had suffered two life-threatening experiences separated by exactly 365 days. It seemed that cosmic click was becoming as regular as clockwork and I was not liking it one bit. I was angry with myself; I knew better than to be out this particular night of the year. The world outside my home on New Year's Eve was not a safe place. This was now a well-established truth, doubly and triply drummed in as proven. Call it superstition, call it coincidence, I took it then and there that the universe was giving me something I no longer desired: a remarkable New Year's Eve stroke-of-midnight event. I drove home as cautiously as I have driven anywhere in my life.

I make no bones about sharing this basic truth with my children: you cannot trust New Year's. People behave badly on New Year's Eve, they drink too much and indulge in stupid behavior. Handguns and tequila along with drinking and driving bubble far closer to the surface on this one night of the year. It is as if people are washed clean with the coming of the New Year and the sins of the previous year no longer weigh against them. A fleeting anarchy fills the air and normally civilized people are compelled to cut loose.

For me the progression went from longing, to disappointment, to observed loss, to danger, to confirmed danger. New Year's Eve, while not trustworthy, is fine if my family and I are safe at home. Sometimes, I even go to bed early.