When I was small, my maternal grandparents lived next to the local ice cream man. His name was Mr. Sweet (really) and I remember seeing his Good Humor truck parked in his driveway during our regular August visits. Although I don't recall ever meeting him, he kept Gramma and Grampa's basement freezer stocked with grandchildren's treats.
On the scale of quality, especially compared to the town creamery or to modern artisanal ice cream, they weren't fabulous, but they were cold and sweet and, as a kid, that was enough. Or nearly so: along with Nutty Buddies, which were probably my favorite, I sought, and sometimes fought with my little brother for, Buried Treasure. Like Nutty Buddies, they were mass-produced, paper-wrapped conical things, but they didn't have a graham or cake cone; instead, they were more like popsicles made of sherbet (I don't recall any flavor other than raspberry, although it seems like there would have been). Treasure pops, as I called them, had a plastic handle topped with a flat, bas-relief figurine, which, in manufacture, was dropped handle-first into the pointed end of the wrapper and the sherbet poured on top of that so that the figure helped hold the sherbet. When you unwrapped it to eat, what you saw was raspberry sherbet on a stick, but as you ate your way down, you'd get to the "treasure" of the figurine. I loved these things, not least because the sherbet was pretty tasty, and I casually collected the sticky leftover hilts.
That was the closest I got growing up to living where there was a regular Ice Cream Man in his Ice Cream Truck. The five Air Force bases I stayed on as a child did not allow them. The year I spent in my parents' home town and, thus, in Mr. Sweet's territory, came after he retired. The housing development I lived in as a teen had no such thing, which, in retrospect seems possibly to have been a consequence of High Desert life (I imagine cruising over macadam in 100º+ Junes and Julys would play havoc with freezers). In any case, all my early associations with ice cream trucks come either from the second-degree proxy of Gram and Gramp's freezer or shared cultural myths about them.
As an adult, however, my experience has been very different.
We can leave the "ice cream" itself alone. Any adult with even the most passing exposure to real ice cream would be forgiven for not recognizing the modern multiply-refrozen mess revealed under the sickly-bright wrapping dispensed by your average ice cream truck occupant. Too, the unnerving price of these semi-crystalized pseudo-noshes clearly reflects the challenge of keeping a small mobile business moving today, compared to when gas was 10¢ a gallon and car insurance was optional. No, that unfortunate casualty of modern life is to be lamented and justly grieved, not berated.
For me, contemporary ice cream trucks have devolved from tragedy to atrocity because of their assault on the sonic environment. Long gone are the quaint miniature carillons (if they ever existed) tinkling out tunes announcing the arrival of The Good Humor Man in Pleasantville. My earliest memory of a musical ice cream truck was in my 30s, when I lived in a New Jersey suburb of New York City: the fake electronic "bells" were broadcast over a bullhorn speaker that would render even the sound of the Choir Invisible fully infernal.
Ice cream trucks seem to be something of a fixture in Maryland, at least in most of the neighborhoods I've lived in since arriving here in '07. And, although the PA systems over which their "music" is blasted have improved, that which erupts from them seems only to have become more heinous. Bells, acoustic or electronic, have given way to flat-enveloped sine-wave tones even lower-fidelity than 80s video game soundtracks. Worse, they play one, single, looping tune, ad nauseam, which pierces my brain like a neurotoxin-tipped arrow, leaving me cognitively paralyzed for the half an hour that they are typically within range of perception. The tortures of their endless excretion of "Turkey in the Straw" are so great as to believably incite even Phillip Glass or Terry Riley to murderous violence. Greater yet is the unforgivable, criminal, diabolical, deployment of "It's a Small World." I assert that even the likes of Ghandi could and would recruit the enthusiastic assistance of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mother Fucking Theresa in pulling the driver from his seat and pummeling him into pink goo over such an act.
In all seriousness, I would rather listen to car alarms and leaf blowers. At the same time.
Summer's chorus is one of my greatest pleasures. As my local ice cream man meanderingly serenades my neighborhood in hopes of enticing the many children here to entreat their parents for the price of his icy indulgences, I have to gird my cochleae against the aural assault of his efforts. Quickly, before That Song gets tattooed onto my auditory cortex: I reach for my phone and play something -- almost anything -- loudly enough to drown out the Mephistophelean chant. I don't begrudge the kids their treats nor the dairy entrepreneur his living; I just resent that ice cream trucks can't more benevolently make themselves part of the delicious soundtrack of summer.
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