Summah

Last night Janie and I walked the dogs to J.T.’s for soft serve. I had a handful of salted almonds wrapped in a paper towel shoved into my jeans pocket. Two child-size soft serves cost $10 these days on the Cape. I’m not paying for nuts when I have them at home!

 We don’t wear a mask when we order our ice cream. The dogs are tired by the end of the day and they quietly beg with their eyes as we sit and eat. Janie orders vanilla with chocolate sprinkles. When I worked at Friendly’s back in the 80s we called chocolate sprinkles jimmies, clueless to the origin of the word.

I’m reading David Mura’s book A Stranger’s Journey. Race Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing because a fellow writer, Sharon Stein McNamara, suggested it to me. If I were playing the race game Mura talks about in his book, I would have said my white friend Janie and I walked the dogs to TJ’s.

 I have never ordered vanilla ice cream. I don’t get it. It’s like eating…boredom. It would take chocolate sprinkles the size of chocolate chips to convince me vanilla is worth asking for a spoon or opening my mouth.

I got chocolate. Yum. I had so many salted almonds that I had at least three in each bite. That is a good thing because a kid’s cup of ice cream is a terrible disappointment, like a sneeze that starts but doesn’t happen. That’s it? I carefully covered the little peak of ice cream with nuts and then pushed as many as I could on top of the first layer with my finger quickly because the ice cream was starting to melt.

I hadn’t washed my hands in a while so who knows what else I was pushing into that ice cream. Summer is glorious, dirty and sweaty and delicious.

This morning I walked with Bird across the way to the beach where no dogs are allowed. In my head, I changed the sign to say no dogs are allowed after 8 am. It was 7:15, so we were good to go. The tide was low, and I could barely see the bay. In the past, Bird refuses to get his feet wet, but at the Cape suddenly he’s running through water in the tidal flats that go up to his knees. He still picks his feet up like he doesn’t agree with the earth, but he looks like he’s smiling.

My dad sounded not good on the phone last night. He has “crap” in his lungs, and I imagined that each word he said cost him a certain amount of energy and so I should listen more closely than usually. It’s hard hearing your dad struggle. I feel old, but he’s older, and I can’t imagine what it’s like for him, being 82 and having “crap” in his lungs. He said he loved me. I said it carefully back.

I love you, Dad.