I followed Jimmy and Tommy through their back door, up three steps, into a small kitchen. Their mom wasn’t home. It was a summer day in 1960.
I was 11 and had just hit two home runs in our daily whiffle ball game, launched over my mother’s Monday drying clothes onto the roof of the Welches’ stucco house. Our infield was the driveway between their garage and ours. My two friends would move away before our baseball season renewed the next summer.
They weren’t twins. Jimmy was my age, Tommy a year younger. They went to public school; my two younger brothers and I went to Sacred Heart, a Catholic school.
Jimmy walked over to the drawer and pulled it open, revealing a space that overflowed with candy bars. I had never seen anything like it: Snickers, Milky Way, Three Musketeers, and a Bun, round instead of rectangular, with milk chocolate and peanuts, my favorite.
“Take two,” he said.
I greedily ate the Bun and put the Snickers in my pocket, not knowing exactly what I would do or where I would hide it from my mother.
Every Friday night, my parents made popcorn and let us have pop, a treat, usually root beer, while we watched TV past 9:00 o’clock, our school night bedtime.
On Sundays, after Mass, my Dad, who never went to church, would serve us pancakes, usually dollar-sized. Our evening dinner was a roast served in the dining room, under the chandelier, with the family room TV brought in to watch Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, another once-a-week treat.
In the middle of the day, the five of us would go to Iowana Dairy, under the Iowa-Illinois Memorial Bridge, where we could order an ice cream treat for our lunch. My choice was usually a chocolate malt, thick enough to turnupside down three decades before the marketing campaign for the Dairy Queen’s Blizzard.
This was our only ice cream for the week.
And except for Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, I don’t remember candy bars ever being available to tempt us.
A week ago, Rebecca and I flew back to the USA from Heathrow Airport in London. We had spent the month in Scotland and England. Because our Air Canada flight was scheduled to depart at 8:30 AM, we had to be at the airport at 5:30, with no time for breakfast until we settled at our gate, where I observed this sight as I wandered around looking for a toilet.
As I relieved myself and thoroughly washed my hands, an iconoclastic thought seeped into and then rooted itself in my mind. Even though this small tub of ice cream cost an outrageous amount in dollars or pounds, could I have ice cream for breakfast?
The answer came as I tilted my head back to study the selection options. It’s not easy to find Häagen-Dazs Belgium Chocolate in my neck of the woods in the USA.
So I ponied up the four pounds, with part of me hoping the machine would jam; the part that listened to my mother.
But inside me, Jimmy and Tommy also spoke.
“Take two,” they said.
