FINALITY 

I suppose we took fewer serious risks as kids because we understood the finality of death. We witnessed it from an early age, beginning with Granny killing and cleaning a chicken for a Sunday dinner with the preacher. We were disappointed that we could no longer visit her mother, Mama Butler, after she had passed on. But we understood that dead meant you weren’t coming back; we had no video games to tell us otherwise.

Doris had been in school a couple of years already, but Jake had just begun first grade. The news gave graphic accounts of how a little boy ducked under a school bus to pick up something. They had to take the wheels off the bus to unwind him from the space between the tandem tires. It wasn’t sensational journalism; it was a cautionary tale to kids and parents, like the safety tips printed on the back of our report cards.

To make sure we didn’t make the same mistake, Dad took all of us down to the place the bus parked and showed us its tandem tires, and he described what happened to the kid. It had its desired effect. I had a healthy respect for those wheels, knowing how narrow that gap was.

I guess it sunk in, because I ran into Doris many years later showing a “poor man’s Frisbee” to her daughter: a cat that had met misfortune on the street that ran close alongside her house. Flat as a tortilla baked crispy in the Georgia sun. Cruel as it seemed, cars sped past her front steps at over forty miles an hour, and her toddling daughter had begun walking at just ten months old.

There were also the fatalities associated with Atlanta’s expansion in the mid-Sixties. Old houses in the path of new airport construction were being moved out of town. I don’t know where they went, but we saw many of those houses float past the apartments on unseen wheels. They rode through at a walking pace, taking up all the traffic lanes. The guys sitting on top of them would grin and wave at the kids. They sat astride the roof peak to lift the live power lines over the house. Some used a stick; others used their hands to lift the wires up and over their heads. I never saw one killed, but Uncle Dave did. I can recall four or five news stories of their deaths, but there were probably more. I guess someone paid them good money for their risk, or paid the right people not to notice.

At Pawpaw’s farm, we saw rats he had poisoned to keep them out of the corncrib and small animals in the woods. But it really came home when we saw the ice cream man.

Our ice cream man owned his own truck. He had a uniform of his own choosing with a jacket and a hat like filling station attendants and bus drivers wore. My Dad wore a hat like that when he drove a truck. We would begin begging Mother for dimes as soon as we heard the music several streets behind us. Kids would come running from all over the apartment complex to meet the ice cream truck when it turned in at the bottom of the hill two rows below us. It was easier to turn around on the broad parking lot where the school buses collected and deposited kids.

I was four and Jake was five. We pried a dime apiece from Mother and trotted down the hill, cutting through two rows of apartments. I had a silver dime with a winged lady on the front.

Though we love each tadalafil 40mg india song played during the wedding receptions, these are a few of our favorites. These were the health benefits for which ancient doctors used the extract to treat patients for such diseases as malaria, heart disease, stomach cheapest price for cialis disorders and even psychological problems for years. It should feature proper exercises, which are effective to cure your sexual disorders and improve your buying viagra uk libido. This simply means that if you want to save money, levitra purchase online have more than one bank account. There were six or eight kids hovering around the truck as he busily filled orders. When there was a larger crowd, he made us form a neat line, but this time we were just gathered in a bunch close alongside the truck. The music played on.

One kid asked for an ice cream, but when he went to pay for it, the boy looked at his empty hands in disbelief. The ice cream man made a sad face and put the ice cream back, telling him he needed a dime. The kid welled up in tears and ran off, over to the row of apartments at the foot of the hill. He trotted across a grass median and over his narrow front lawn to where his father sat drinking beer on the porch.

My attention was mostly focused on a dime that lay underneath the truck. I didn’t know where it had come from, but if no one claimed it, I was planning to pick it up once the truck moved.

Things just kind of exploded. A very angry man cursed, and we turned toward where the kid had run. “Nobody is going to cheat my son!” he bellowed between snarls of profanity. Before we could even react, he sprang off the porch and ran straight at the truck, much faster than one would expect of a drunk. Kids moved back just a couple of few feet, anticipating an argument. The ice cream man was exposed to the father’s full fury.

“You cheated my son!” he spat, and with one swift motion, he raised a butcher knife from alongside his thigh and cut the throat of the ice cream man, who had no chance to explain anything. He just gurgled. The father had sliced his neck deep, laying the meat open. The ice cream man fell back into the truck bleeding. The angry father stomped off and sat back on his porch. We squealed and ran. We told mother what had happened to the ice cream man, and I mentioned the stray dime beneath the truck. I wondered if the kid had dropped it. I would never know for sure.

We followed Doris down there a bit later. The truck was still there, and the police were taking an even drunker father off that porch. We couldn’t get close enough to tell anyone about the dime beneath the truck.

Now he really slurred when he shouted about the expletive ice cream man who cheated his son out of a dime. They handcuffed him and stuffed him into a police car. Someone had already shut off the ice cream man’s music.

It was final. The ice cream man never came back. No other ice cream man ever took his place. My Dad ran into his daughter about ten years ago near Gratis. The family still has his truck.

We miss you, ice cream man. You were nice, and fifty years later you are still remembered by the kids you were nice to.
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