Scoops

There are two kinds of scoops. The first is a word in the dustbin of history having been replaced by breaking news. Here is what used to happen, at least in movies.

Under relentless cross-examination the witness breaks down and blows the case wide open. An ace reporter with his chewed cigar bolts from  the courtroom to the nearest phone to give his paper, the Trib, the biggest scoop since Lindbergh and the extra edition hits the streets before the Evening Star giving the chain-smoking editor a raise and making the publisher, with his pipe, a shoe-in for D.A. or better yet, a chair in the State House because the party needs a decent man to drive out the corruption downtown even though his wife has been institutionalized since he pushed her down the stairs when she caught him in a compromising way but a newspaperman with a nose for trouble smells something fishy and the wife to spill the beans even in her comatose state. But I can explain everything, the governor shouts as they take him away and the cub reporter from the Star calls in his first scoop. 

Back then, crime was something for the police blotter. We've come a long way down the primrose path. 

The other scoop brings me to ice cream. I knew early on I was either destined for greatness or there was something seriously wrong with me when I looked around and saw everyone else licking their ice cream in a cone, while I bit mine. Not big hunks, just nibbles. I deemed it a greater joy to my teeth than to my tongue. There could be a profound truth hidden in all this but it eludes me at the moment.

When the Good Humor truck sounded its bell we kids salivated like Pavlovian dogs. Toasted almond bars, Dixie cups and popsicles. I bit them all. I remember nibbling on an Eskimo Pie, which was neither Eskimo nor pie, when news came that World War II was won. I think I dropped it on the sidewalk, always a small tragedy when ice cream fell to the ground. It is one of life’s set-backs that ultimately prepares us for other existential crises.

Ice cream could be a chronicle of maturation over the years by noting how flavor choices evolved. I was a vanilla sort of kid until first grade when I discovered the inherent psychedelic alkaloids buried deep inside chocolate. I had a strawberry phase and possibly even forays into orange and raspberry sherbet. Butter pecan had never been short-listed. I’ve always resented the intrusion of nuts into the smoothness however I did go through a rum-raisin phase.

In recent years new flavors have emerged which I would not mind being preserved in, cryogenically speaking. Among these are peach, pumpkin and chocolate malt crunch. I shall not bite the dust but the ice cream.

These days, ice cream-lovers have to call their psychiatrists to find out which flavor they want when faced with Cherry Garcia peanut-butter clusters or black-mountain praline caramel ripple. Make it one scoop of each.

To bite at life or to lick it? Something of each, I think, an arrangement between tooth and tongue. To seize and to savor. But why seize at all? Maybe because I might miss something in transit. My daughter tells me she is also a bit of a biter so it must be familial. 

All the above is my way of practicing for my next incarnation as an ostrich while the world implodes.