An ice cream stand is as good a place as any to watch people. There is something soothing about a summer night with ice cream, sitting in the car slouched over a double scoop of mocha almond chip (for my wife; I take a sherbet), listening to mindless summer music. All sorts arrive: a visiting Little League team; teenagers from the beach; an elderly couple who eat their entire dessert without exchanging a word; a young father with three children in the back and a harried wife trying to negotiate peace while he struggles with three cones, a float, and the change.
People do funny things while they wait. If they're with a group, they'll talk, but never really to each other, their eyes glancing somewhere, at the electric bug killer (it's crunchzap!!, somewhat unnerving reminder of the gist of things). Women will always cross their arms across their breasts, even in the hottest weather. Younger women will often be dressed in anything, sometimes stylish, sometimes not. The older women, if they are the kind who sing in Sweet Adelines choruses and play golf, will wear unflattering culottes and sleeveless cotton shirts through which one can see the outlines of formidable foundation garments, complete with K-Mart sneakers and blue peds, their hair neatly architectured, their skin, if tanned, still slightly flabby, all of them carrying the detritus of simply getting older. They will gab -- that is the proper word. Content is not important, only that the time be filled with chatty circumspect conversation.
Not all groups are as lively. Couples, momentarily faced with a small wait, will talk discreetly, often cryptically. I sometimes think that they are embarrassed by the wait, the empty time calling out the sudden emptinesses that can crop up even between ardent lovers. Much better to have the cones and have the mouth busy than suspect whatever suspicion may bring out of the dark closets. Kids will run around, their elders suffering their presence.
Loners are even more interesting. They will read the menu, twice, and a third time if the line is slow. They will read the small print about the meals tax, concentrate on the ghost letters in the signboard where the sun had left a shadow before the letters were moved, even read the dollar bill, not understanding the Latin, realizing that, yes, the number one occurs sixteen times. They fidget, slouch into the hip, shifting back and forth like a peripatetic philosopher struggling with the question of the good life, and read the menu again. Uncomfortable with the abridgement of their non-thinking schedule, with the sullen mirror a few uneventful moments brings out, their ice cream is all the sweeter for the anodyne it gives to the brain.
We as a species are not good waiters. We often don't know what to say to fill the time and are hampered by the notion that somehow the time ought to be filled, that silence is an admission of failure. We will fill the spaces with any sort of triviality, feeling uncomfortable with the unaccustomed freedom a rend in the fabric of a hurried life gives us. More content are we to take our ice cream and walk calmly back into what is expected of us, bearing into the usual and the routine a bit of sweetness to offset the return trip.
And as I pull out of the parking lot, I, too, have my bits of sweetness to write as these thoughts. And all of us melt back into the compartments we call our lives, intersecting occasionally, like bees daubed with pollen, indifferent to where we spread the fertility, unconscious that we have done so, only eager to get back to the honey that sustains our quiet, our tentative, our mostly unknown lives.