Joanna Howard - Rerun Era

Joplin is forty minutes away, so it is an outing. Joplin is in another state. We go to another state for ice cream. We go to another state for everything. My dad works for a trucking company that is in another state, a third state, even. Its in between our state and this ice cream state, which doesnt even seem possible since everything is under an hour away. Under an hour.

And everything is flat and dry and a field or a long flat road. Everything is grass that is on its way out or on its way in. The seasons are the season of hot and muggy, the season of ice storms, the season of tornados. In the hot and muggy season we get ice cream most nights after my dad comes home from work.

I dont even really like ice cream as a kid. It is always being offered as a bribe for something, but then they get me the ice cream and I have to get another bribe to eat the ice cream. Ice cream is too controlling. There is a lot of guilting, guilting around the flavors, like when my moms friend buys me German chocolate which is her favorite, a flavor that has coconut right in it. I scream. I scream bloody murder and drop down in the parking lot having a conniption. I hurl the ice cream at a parked car. I get half dragged away.

But in Joplin there is Andersons where they have old-fashioned everything. This is not the time when old-fashioned things are thought to be good: this is a time when old-fashioned things are thought to be novelty and overpriced and dingy and generally for the elderly. When we go to the ice cream shop, it is always us and the elderly.

My dad doesnt mind the elderly. He gets along with everybody because of being from a place. When you are from a place forever, you know how to be with the people from the place even if you are younger. It doesnt matter that the place is in another state because all the states touch, so my dad gets to be from four of the states at once. We all do, but less so than my dad.

At Andersons my dad gets black walnut every time. His honest favorite flavor of ice cream is black walnut, which to me tastes like mold and rot. We have a black walnut tree in our yard, where my little red swing is, and when the walnuts are ripe, I hop up and down in the swing and shake the limb, and the walnuts drop from the tree encased in their exterior balls of black ooze and they burst like bombs all over the lawn furnishings and walkways and stain everything a dark color. Black walnut, black walnut. My dad is obsessed. He panels the house in walnut, the hardwood floors are stained walnut. Walnut is a color of luxury.

But Andersons has an old-fashioned vanilla ice cream cone that has been pre-dipped in the most lurid cherry-flavored wax and then frozen very solid. A row of these sit at the back of the freezer case waiting for me. As regards sweets, I like always the red things, and the pink things. I do not care for the chocolate things, or the butterscotch things or the things with nuts. If I am given a chocolate thing or a thing with nuts I scream and hurl it. But I enjoy the red and pink things. I think I can taste red and pink, and that is a flavor. (It is! It is fruit, this is not made up!) The man behind the counter wears a paper hat, and is a bit slow or slow of wits, and he looks both very old and very young, older than my parents in some ways, and young somehow too in his softness in his slow approach to the dipping of the homemade ice creams. Sometimes his father is there too, and he too seems both young and old at once. Perhaps it is the paper hat. The buzz cuts make their heads look like gray fuzzy baby heads. They have both always worked at the ice cream shop, my mom says, even since she was young, and they are part of a family bound by ice cream and paper hats, and also cinnamon rolls which cost five dollars. It is the paper hat father who is shaking hands with Dennis Weaver in the photographs on the wall.

I am docile. I have my red frozen thing. My mother points to the photographs.

Thats Dennis Weaver, she says. I shrug. Hes from Joplin, she says.

I shrug, Ive heard it before.

Hes so handsome, my mother says.

I guess, I guess he is, but I dont say. He has a mustache. I like mustaches. I came out of the womb liking mustaches, I dont know why.

He was Chester on Gunsmoke, my dad says, before Festus, he was Marshall Dillons sidekick.

I like Festus, I say. I know my dad likes Chester better. I rebel. I rebel by preferring Festus.