Is the ice cream man your enemy?

I’m 42 years old and I can’t ignore the ice cream truck. I just can’t. 

I never had an ice cream truck as a kid. But, I remember listening to an Eddie Murphy concert on tape (don’t tell my mother) and he had a bit about the ice cream man. His premise was that kids lose all sense of decorum and go into absolute hysterics when that familiar jingle is heard.

I thought it was hilarious because Murphy is an expert at making us laugh, but I really didn’t get it until I moved to Shrewsbury almost nine years ago. Now I know that the frozen treat frenzy is universal and very, very valid.

My neighbor told her kids the ice cream truck was, in fact, a musical school bus. They would stand and wave as it slowly drove by, my neighbor undaunted behind them making squinty eye contact with the ice cream man—she was winning this daily summer battle against that dastardly purveyor of fatty cold delectations. Her children believed her for quite some time until they saw another kid (probably mine) at the window of this bus being handed a King Cone. The jig was finally up.

I thought my saving grace would be when I told my kids I would not finance their calorie-laden desires any longer! (If they stopped, I could stop). They would just have to dig into their coffee cans filled with their irregularly earned allowance and dollars slipped into pockets through grandparent generosity. So, after my dictate was handed down and the “Do Your Ears Hang Low” refrain rang out I waited to hear what my boys would do. Yes, okay, I was secretly hoping they would shell out their own cash so I could dole out mine.

A mad dash up and down the stairs ensued. “The ice cream man is coming!!!” It was just as Eddie Murphy had said. Coffee cans in hand, dog barking at the commotion, my kids banged their way out the screen door and ran into the road to stop the college kid driving the magical bus. Darn!…..Yay!

What I find utterly incredible is the almost bionic ability of my kids to hear that cursed ice cream truck when it’s over 3 miles away, and, at the same time, the inability to perceive sound when I tell them for the fourth time to find their shoes. My husband suffers from that strange hearing problem too. Hmmmmm.

When the local moms and I are hanging out in each other’s yards monitoring the kids (flipping through magazines and catching up on benign gossip), we formulate our response plan as soon as we hear the truck coming. Our hearing is and always has been bionic. In fact, I overheard my 8-year-old tell a buddy I was a ninja—but that’s another story.

“We’re out of money.”

“It’s too close to dinnertime.”

“You just had it yesterday.”

And then, when we’ve got nothing left on the roster of excuses, we give in. After all, who doesn’t like ice cream?