Ice cream

Today--Sunday-- I went to a mall. Now, I am not a mall fan. I did not receive the usual female shopping gene and actually HATE anything that even looks like a mall; but my good friend, Barbara, likes to shop, and I like spending time with her... so we went to one of the newer malls in town. It's not as bad as some. It's basically a "mall village"-- trying to pretend it's a little town... instead of installing itself in what's left of the real town. You are not encased in a huge building with a roof but go from shop to shop, walking via a brick pathway, decorated with intermittent concrete benches and a central area with splashing fountains. We stopped in at the Body Shop, Anthropologie, and J.Jill (the best place to buy clothes for women older than 40 and heavier than 130 lbs.)... and I allowed myself to be coerced into Saks because Barbara had to get her special tinted moisterizer (which costs more than you want to know). Saks is scary. I felt like a bag woman and was sure that any minute I would be thrown out by security guards and told never to darken their automatic doors again.

Before getting to Saks, I bought things... but, I swear, everything was on sale(!)--which brought the cost of the items down closer to a reasonable price. I was rewarding myself for having completed two-fifths of a script-writing project and am still working hard not to feel guilty about buying two turtle-neck sweaters and a nice black jacket with lots of silver buttons. As penance, I will take three items to the Salvation Army this week. I still have things I wore in high school, so it's not like I'm a fashion freak. (You can hear the defensive desperation, can't you...)

After exhausting ourselves and talking to everyone we encountered (feeling especially free to do so since we were without family members and would not embarrass our children), I sugggested getting some ice cream. I think the last time I had REAL ice cream I was still wearing shoulder pads... which would make it around 20 years ago. We checked the store map and saw Baskin-Robbins AND Haagen Das. Haagen Das was closer.

About 20 feet across the bricks, we opened the door and went in to find the Haagen Das store empty except for a beautiful young Asian woman (who probably weighed in at 90 lbs.) behind the counter. After much looking and consideration, I asked for a cup of two scoops-- Mayan Chocolate and Coffee ice cream. Barbara got a cone of something, which didn't even register in my brain because I was salivating over the thought of Mayan Chocolate! I began thinking about my personal ice cream history while watching my ice cream being scooped into a wax cup.

When I was growing up, we had three basic ice cream flavors: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. It was a big deal when something called "Fudge Ripple" appeared in the grocery stores, and my mother immediately seized on it as a special treat for Sunday dinners. My favorite thing to do was to stir the fudge ripple vigorously until it softened, got creamy and became... (tah-dah!) chocolate. After pretending not to notice my bourgeoise behavior for several weeks, my mother finally expressed her horror, saying that playing with your food was not allowed at the dinner table. So I was forced to eat my vanilla ice cream with swirls of chocolate without desecrating it.

Oh, yes. There was another ice cream option in my young life. In the summer we occasionally got homemade ice cream-- made with fresh peaches. It was the only time I ever liked eating fruit when I was a child. My usual preferred diet consisted of meat, potatoes, and any sweet carbohydrate I could find. I loved visiting friends without siblings who had no competition for the cookies, cokes, and chips that I rarely found at my house. With three brothers and a sister, the pickings were slim.

At the mall, Barbara and I sat down to eat our decadent (but osteoporosis preventing) treat. The young woman who had dished it up for us rushed out of the store to stand outside and smoke a cigarette. We smiled as the cold creamy sweet stuff melt on our tongues. Ice cream beats tobacco any day. I had forgotten its sensuous spell.

O.k. I have mentioned the four dogs who come to work at my office. Annabelle-- the puppy pit-- is now about a year old and still wanting to chew everything. She has ingested two beds and 4 or 5 doggie toys and now has only two rubber bones remaining for her entertainment. Several cardboard boxes have shredded corners, and anything plastic is endangered. I can no longer walk past her wearing a skirt of any length because she thinks the swishing fabric is beckoning her to bite, bite, bite! (Occasionally the bites go through the fabric into the leg, and I have a nice little row of what looks like vampire bites on my left calf. She seems to prefer my left side... a definite threat to the party in power.)
Annabelle and Malone (the boxer-pit) spend most of their office time asleep on the only remaining dog bed that has not been chewed up. There is a kind of love-hate relationship between them as they vye for space on this sad little bed. Usually Malone gets his butt and hind legs on the bed, with Annabelle squeezing her whole, skinny self on the 1/3 that is left. The snoring becomes more and more apparent after their lunch/pee break (and reward of biscuits for successful and appropriate peeing), and I sometimes have to wake them up in order to have a conversation on the phone. (Once a caller asked if they were using a jackhammer on the street outside.) The whining dreams are not as upsetting to callers, who just assume we are having some kind of emotional meltdown.
Besides providing amusement and sympathetic eyes when things go wrong, the dogs' main job is to frighten all new visitors who come to our basement door. This ensures that the unsuspecting visitors will not break down the door and try to mess with our small--but incredibly talented-- office staff. We do not get many solicitations, and we have to escort the meter reader to the small closet that holds the secret meters owned by the power company. We could probably avoid paying our electric bill by keeping him at bay for months at a time, but have decided it might ultimately lead to increased rates or total darkness.