Ice Cream and Mice

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man [or woman, in my case] I gave up childish ways. - 1 Corinthians 13:11, ESV

Do you remember when you were a kid, the excitement you felt every time you heard the sound of the ice cream truck?

In my neighborhood, it usually came around 5 or 5:30 pm, not long after my parents came home from work.

Whether I was inside the house or out playing in the neighborhood, I would hear the truck while it was still far off, run to my parents and beg for money to buy just one ice cream, just this once.

Usually they said no, but on a very few occasions, the conceded and gave me a dollar or two to buy one of those Tweety Bird ice creams with the gumball eyeballs. Other kids liked the Mickey Mouse ice cream, but Tweety Bird was the favorite of my daddy and I both.

If my parents weren't home, or if they said no, I would scour the house looking for lost change. Under the couch, under the cushions, behind the bookshelf in my bedroom, in the laundry room...I knew all the secret places to find lost quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Then I would take what I had found and run to the truck, no matter how far down the street it had gone by this time, and drop my coins on his tiny little counter and find out what I could buy with my change. Usually all I could afford were those white powdery candy cigarettes, but I was happy to get anything from the ice cream truck no matter what it may have been.

I loved the sound of the ice cream truck so much that I asked my mom to buy me a piano book so I could learn to play "The Entertainer", the theme song of our neighborhood ice cream truck, on our old piano.

She did, and I'm quite sure she regretted it.

After I grew up I lost interest in the ice cream truck. Every now and then I would hear it and recall the memory of past excitements, but usually I was at after school activities, or youth group, or a friend's house, and the ice cream truck faded into the distant past of my childhood.

Until recently.

Now that I live in an apartment complex full of little children, I once again hear the ice cream truck pass by daily.

It comes every day around 3.

Remind me never again to be home at 3.

The sound drags on for one to two hours, depending on how many children come running.

He circles the complex over and over, parking outside our side window first, and then moving to the other side.

Just when I think he's gone, he comes back around again.

The song is no longer "The Entertainer" but some awful chiming tune that repeats over and over and over again, usually when I'm trying to study.

After it plays through once, this awful lady's voice says cheerfully, "Hello!"

At first I thought that the ice cream truck was driven by a woman, and she would greet the children as they came running towards her.

Then I realized it was just a recording, and it's probably some smelly man driving that thing as it goes on and on for hours.

What used to be music to my ears and excite in me so much happiness and emotion now has the opposite effect. I dread the time of day that the truck comes by. I intentionally try to avoid being home at 3pm.

And yet it still brings those little children so much joy. They still go running to the truck, and leave with their mouths and hands sticky and too much sugar in their blood. And of course, I can't begrudge them the same happiness that I used to feel every day around 5pm.



AND NOW FOR THE MICE!

Last night at 2:47am I awoke to the sound of a mouse trap going WHACK!

I thought, "we finally got that little white fella!"

Until I got up and saw it.

It was grey.

How many of them are there?? How long must this go on?

And to make matters worse, when I opened the water heater closet to get the broom out to sweep up his little body, I saw ANOTHER tiny mouse go running into the crack in the closet wall!!

AAAHHH!!!

I'm terrified of the night I wake up to find them running all over my bed.

AAAHHH!!!