Because my husband, Michael, and I lived in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn before we met, we share memories that go back to our childhoods. We remember when there was a Woolworth’s on Avenue J — it was where I bought candy with my weekly allowance. We remember blackout cake from Ebinger’s and pizza from DiFara, now famous but then the local slice joint. So one recent night, when we were finishing dinner and Michael said, “I was thinking about the ice cream at that restaurant near Coney Island Avenue,” I jumped in and said, “Remember how it always had itsy bits of ice in it!” It was just the point he wanted to make. The ice was always there, but somehow still always unexpected. I liked it.
I liked the snowflake-shaped frost on Good Humor sundaes too. I liked the Grape-Nuts ice cream we had in Maine on our honeymoon. I didn’t like that Michael put chocolate ice cream on his blueberry pie — it looked messy when it melted — but I got over it.
That night, sitting at the kitchen counter, I realized that I probably could mark my life in memories of ice cream. Ice cream with my father somewhere near a broken-down garage in Rockaway, where the car’s flat tire was being repaired. Ice cream at the Prospect Park Zoo — also with my father. After-school scoops with my son, Joshua, at the Häagen-Dazs shop that used to be on Broadway, in Manhattan. Soft-serve eaten in the car when the Dairy Queen near our house in Connecticut finally opened, an event Joshua looked forward to for months. D.Q.’s season was pretty much the same as baseball’s: Sometime after spring training got underway, the store would crank up its machines, and Joshua would get a Blizzard.