I have eaten at a Whitey’s ice cream shop hundreds of times, but the trip I describe below prompted this reflection about the ruthlessness and humility of time.
The most memorable trip to my favorite ice cream store was not even about ice cream. Or not only ice cream. Even now, five years later, I hold in my mind two images. One, my all time favorite food item, a Whitey’s chocolate malt and two, well, please read on.
It was February 2015 and Rebecca and I were taking five Luther College students from Decorah, Iowa to Bloomington, Illinois to attend a Human Rights workshop at Illinois Wesleyan University. My hometown of Davenport, Iowa is halfway and we decided to stop, at one of the Whitey’s locations, on 53rd street. The students in the van were in their own little worlds, some chatting, others with ear buds, when I drove into the parking lot and maneuvered the van forward into a parking space.
One by one the students noticed the sign and then came a spontaneous burst of commentary: “I don’t believe it;” “it’s 2015;” “Whitey’s, seriously? “oh my God” & “how could they name it Whitey’s?” Rebecca and I looked at each other, dumbfounded, for a moment. I had been going to Whitey’s for decades and so knew its history. I explained to the students the Whitey’s name came from the original owner who was nicknamed Whitey because of his blond hair. The name dates from the 1930s and when the business was sold in the 1950s the name stuck. All five students listened politely but skeptically and decided to eat next door at Subway.
A few days ago I shared this story with a Davenport friend who replied in an email:
“Those students have a great perspective – just as we did at that age.”
Bingo, that was it! My friend put words to why this visit to Whitey’s had stuck with me. Whitey’s has always meant something more than just a great chocolate malt. In my memory, family times in a Whitey’s or the long-gone Iowana Dairy in Bettendorf, Iowa or Decorah’s Whippy Dip where I would take my 90 year old mother when she visited were always comfortable and free from everyday family-tensions.
These malt-musings full of nostalgia were on my mind as I drove into Whitey’s in 2015 only to be interrupted by the ruthlessness of the student comments. In response, I wanted to say to them what I am saying now to you.
How dare you? Let me have, let me hold onto, the innocence of my past. Don’t complicate my memories with your interpretations.
My friend’s words quoted above triggered two concluding revelations. One is a memory fragment of the family room of the house I grew up in, with an orange couch and yellow’ish’ shag carpet, as it was the summer of 1970. My father Paul, Uncle Al and cousin Jim are sitting around a table. Jim and I are in college, he at Loras, me at St. Ambrose.
It is about a month after Kent State where four students were killed and nine were injured by the national guard. We are arguing about Vietnam, race relations, poverty, and the Kent State shootings. I threw every negative judgment about America I could at my father and uncle, eventually stalking out. I was the angry and immature version of the students in the van, in a different place and time. In my mind, ruthlessly dismantling their world.
Now, I am old and I am them, my father and uncle. Not exactly, of course. I am a Democrat; they were Republican. But this Whitey’s reflection is about more than politics. It is about the ruthlessness and humility of time, what it does to all of us.
This brings me to the second revelation, urged on by my favorite stanza from my favorite Bob Dylan song, The Times They are a changing:
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
Time is ruthless because the ‘times are [always] a-changing.’ And it suggests humility because yesterday’s ‘sons and daughters’ are today’s ‘mothers and fathers.’ Even Dylan’s language, ‘mothers and fathers,’ for example, would be interrogated by many today.
My Whitey’s story is now a more complicated one. It contains a dose of the old and a portion of the new. And if I apply this lesson to many other parts of my personal and public life, if I can lend a hand to whatever new is coming, at least in conversation, then my adversaries may stop seeing me as the enemy.
And I them.
