síðsumar

I can hear an ice cream truck rolling past on a nearby street. I can never seem to tell what street is it, however. The jingle of it Dopplers first towards us and then away again, never stopping at the here and never once coming into sight.

And that tune. Why that one? Infernally catchy, almost insipidly rural-sounding, like a hokey leitmotif signaling the Entrance of the Hayseed. I write this despite having never heard it in any context but this one, the circuit of the ice cream truck. (It is just as well no one remembers the tune from minstrel shows.)

Ice cream used to be hokey-pokey, but Italian hokey-pokey men no longer call that phrase out. In fact, the ice cream man is no longer reliably Italian, just as the beat cop is no longer Irish.

I have never seen the truck here, and so I have not gotten to chase it, catch it, lean against its metal flank (on a sunny day, searing hot - be careful) while pushing a few coins across the window's narrow steel lip across to the man in the jacket. I haven't done that since I was a child. But summer is over anyway, and I don't need to see the truck to know that it is white.