My (one) Amish Summer
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| Image by Tom Markoski from Pixabay |
Letters of eclectic commentary featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer and {Dana}, a persistent hallucination and charming literary device.
"Do you sell pop-seekles by the box too?" -Anonymous Amish Teenager
Dear Gentlereaders,
Late spring and early summer were when neighborhood-based professional popsicle peddlers based north of the Mason-Dixon line had their most profitable days of the season. I assume this is true of the food truck-based version, but I bailed when the former version began to die and before the rise of the latter.
This is why I, your favorite former off-again-on-again ice cream man, is writing about being a popsicle peddler, again. While I think about it every year at this time, this is the first year I've written about it. If you're interested, I've written two other columns, this one and this one.
My sister-in-law, Aunt Brenda, was the one who told me about _______ Road, just off 422, in Parkman? She was a Yoder Toter at the time, a title she didn't much care for, deeming it demeaning to the Amish people she toted around in a van for a while.
The Urban Dictionary defines Yoder Toter as "A large white 16-seater van that carries the Amish on excursions to Walmart." The Urban Dictionary prioritizes humor over scholarship, but if you live here in Hooterville, or any area that has a large-ish Amish community from what I can tell, this is a relatively accurate definition, although I can't remember if Aunt Brenda's van was a white 16-seater.
In the unlikely event an Amish person should read this, I apologise if you're offended. I went a-googlin' and found nothing about the Amish finding the term offensive and I've never encountered anyone who used the term in a derogatory fashion when referencing a van, its driver, or the Amish.
I have encountered a few "English" people (to the Amish, we're the English) who don't care for the Amish for one reason or another. I love the Amish even though I only spent one evening a week, for one summer, selling them ice cream bars and pop-seekles from the ice cream truck I owned towards the end of my on-again-off-again career as an ice cream man.
Picture this in your mind's eye. You're driving a large, pink ice cream truck down a quiet country road. Except for the fact it's pink and the ceramic-coated signs have been flipped over and now say Carrousel Ice Cream. It's a "real" Good Humor truck with brass "sleigh bells" but without a loud, obnoxious electronic music box cranking out the same few bars of Turkey in the Straw over and over and over again.
The houses on this very quiet country road...
{Wait-wait-wait. A "real" Good Humor ice cream truck? Why pink? Why reversed and remounted signs that now say Carrousel Ice Cream? Why is carousel spelled wrong?}
Because this is the greater Hooterville Metropolitan Area, and unlike the Pittsburgh area, there is no tradition of Good Humor trucks, or Goody Bar men/ladies, returning every spring in company bespoke ice cream trucks with ceramic-coated signs.
In fact, I found out the hard way that ice cream trucks had a bad reputation in these parts. There is, or rather was (this narrative is ancient history), a large fleet based in Cleveland that had a small local depot here at the time featuring high prices and low-born (not all, I was friends with some of them) drivers.
{Low-born drivers?}
A bit of literary fodorol on my part, high prices — low-born drivers? But many of them did look and behave like personal friends of Cheech and Chong in their glory(?) days. Although this was the 90s. Long story short, after experiencing no shortage of kids yelling "rip off man," but otherwise ignoring me, drastic action was needed/taken. To the natives of this part of the world, all ice cream trucks were the same, they all sucked sweaty sox.
Since the Good Humor name didn't mean much locally, I partially switched to a lower quality product line, flipped the signs, and painted the truck pink, having never encountered a Pink ice cream truck. Pinky had a big smile painted on her large front bumper and headlights that served as the pupils of painted-on eyes.
There was no mistaking my truck for one of my enemies' trucks. Build a brand, that's what all those Inc. articles said.
The pièce de résistance (pronounced pizza resistance) was a large 50¢ displayed in the middle of my main menu board that could be seen from fifty feet away. I had a dozen items for sale at that price that I sold for at least twice what I paid for them when I first started. As time went by, there were fewer and fewer of them, but by then I had built a trusted brand and business.
"Yo, everything on this sign is really fifty cents?"
Where was I... You're driving a large, pink ice cream truck down a very quiet...
{Did you know you had spelled carousel wrong?}
Heavy sigh.
The standard current spelling is carousel, but carrousel, caroussel, and carousell are used here, there, and even way over there. I deliberately chose two R's (that's how the Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum spells it), hoping to get the attention of members of the Spelling Police Department (bad publicity ain't necessarily bad publicity — build the brand), but I was only rarely accosted. I should have gone with carroussell.
Picture this in your mind's eye. You're driving a large, pink ice cream truck down a very quiet country road. The houses on this road are relatively few and far between, but it's a long road, and the Amish still make lots of babies; the way the English used to. Many of them are adjacent to large gardens or fields of neatly planted rows of various and sundry crops. Barns are not rare.
There's minimal motorized traffic as there are only a couple of houses with cars or trucks in the driveway. Horse-drawn black buggies occasionally clop, clop, clop by and you have to watch out for large clumps of horse... exhaust that you need to avoid if you don't want your truck to smell like horse... exhaust.
Fortunately, this is easy to do because of minimal traffic, motorized or otherwise. Besides, you've got to drive super slowly. Many of the houses are far back from the road and you have to work your bell rope enthusiastically to make sure they know you're out and about, Quasimodo.
Obnoxious electronic music boxes, which can be (and often are) turned up quite loud, would be more efficient for this but you bet the Amish would hate them as much as you do, and for all you know, it might spook the horses. There are not a lot of horses around, but there are always horses around.
If you're old like me and lived in a neighborhood served daily, sometimes twice daily (parents love that) by an ice cream truck, now you know why you could often hear but not see the maroon that drove your kids into a frenzy on hot summer days.
You spot a handmade phone booth. The followers of the local Amish Ordnung are somehow managing to survive without dumbphones in their houses or smartphones in their pockets.
You creep along pulling on your bell rope with a practiced rhythm, alert to what's happening on both sides of the road while always keeping an eye on the rearview for maroons (see Bunny, Bugs) about to pass you at twice the speed of sound.
A smiling woman wearing a white bonnet steps out onto her front porch (married women wear white bonnets, unmarried black) and holds up her hand. You pull over to the edge of her yard to wait. She goes back into the house, and in short order, a gaggle of kids emerges and spills out over the front yard.
Soon, girls in black bonnets and boys in straw hats are huddled in front of your menu boards, giggling, pointing, quietly conferring. A consensus is reached, and the oldest girl, it's almost always an oldest girl, once in a while a mom or a grandma, proceeds to conduct business with you while the kids fidget, giggle, and look embarrassed if you make eye contact.
I'm in a movie and it's 1955.
There is no whining. There's is no arguing. None of the boys are busting a sag. None of the girls is so scantily dressed that you have to do your best not to get caught noticing for fear of being accused of something by someone, or worse yet, being flirted with by a little girl in a woman's body.
(I was asked if I was gay, more than once, when I didn't respond to a given teenager's, um... charms, while peddling popsicles over the years; I who have a face and a body made for radio.)
By the end of that first season, I was starting to make friends and having conversations with the adult Amish who lived on _______ Road and had started visiting my truck.
When school got out the following year, I once again had the time to squeeze in one evening a week in Amish country. I didn't think they'd want me coming up more than once, maybe twice a week anyway. I worked from one end of ______ Road to the other in about half an hour and sold almost nothing. Yikes! Where should I go for the next couple of hours? I waved to the Amish folks I saw. None waved back, none came near me.
Finally, a customer, a family with cars in the driveway instead of black buggies.
"Yeah, some guy in one of those ice cream trucks that plays music has been coming by, every day, for the last two weeks or so. Drives too fast too."
And that, dear gentlereaders, was that.
Colonel Cranky
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