Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-05-08 - 9:08 p.m.

CHERRYS $3 A BSKT

Summer is on its way.

I know it, because on the way to work I passed a truck pulled over on the side of the road with a sign: "CHERRYS $3 a BSKT". And just the other day, I heard the unmistakable muffled-bell song of the ice cream truck.

My girls have never had ice cream from the ice cream truck. Never, not once. The ice cream truck in our town is driven by a surly man whose only English seems to be "neapolitan", and the truck itself is filthy and covered with peeling stickers of all sorts. I won't buy from it. I have visions of my children coming down with some dairy-borne encephalitis, or winding up on the front cover of the Enquirer under the headline "Flesh-Eating Fudgesicles".

But that's sad, in a way. Because they don't know about the way your heart races and you can't breathe when you hear that song down the block, and how you have to run to find your mother and get that quarter right NOW, or the ice cream man will be gone, gone, gone. Or how it's the same feeling you get later when you first catch sight of the carnival rides at the fair, or much later when the phone finally rings and you know it must be HIM. It's the ice cream anthem that introduces you to that rush.

Summer, for us, was that ice cream truck. And summer was the way bathing caps smelled, and the way they ripped out your hair when you unhooked the strap and pulled them off. All girls had to wear caps at the pool, and boys didn't, and no one gave that a second thought. The public pool was a high chlorine sea of gently bobbing bathing caps. I had one that had petals on top, like a hydrangea, in pastel colors. It would have been way cool, but nothing was, yet. Nothing was even cool yet. If you had a cap you liked, it was neat.

My children have never had, or probably even seen, a plastic bathing cap. And this is a good thing, because the era of plastic caps was also the era of the pixie haircut, and this too has passed. I can only imagine how misshapen my girls' heads would appear after we'd managed to jam their two feet of hair up under those hydrangeas.

Summer was sprinklers, too. Summer was somebody's parents who were so desperate to get the kids out of the house that they'd turn those sprinklers on in the heat of the day, and leave them on for an hour. And we ran in them and shrieked, and got big purple shin-whacks from the rainbird type, and played until the whole lawn made a marsh-marsh sound under our feet. We had slip-n-slides, too, because we didn't know about back and neck trauma. My kids don't know slip-and slides, and I am a patriotic Californian who waters in the late evening, and then only for twenty minutes.

Summer was two quarters if your sister would take you down to the ice cream store and get you out of Mother's hair for an hour. It was the walk to the store in our rubber zoris, through the apricot orchard where the dust was like talcum and puffed up with every step, and you had to take the zoris off and go barefoot because the dust felt so wonderful. Summer was chocolate dipped, if you'd talked your mother out of that extra nickel.

My kids do have the ice cream, but they don't get to walk for it, and they don't get chocolate dipped. They get gummy bears. Gummy bears are, in my book, disgusting. But then, that's what my kids would say about my beloved bathing cap.

They still do have the rubber thongs, although they're flip-flops now, and no one seems to know what zoris or go-aheads are any more. But I am happy to report that they "blow out" exactly the same as they always did, with the little rubber stopper-goody popping through the hole in the sole at completely inconvenient times, and anybody's parent can still force it back through for you.

So the summer essentials - ice cream and rubber shoes - have stayed the same. And summer is still glorious summer.

When the plums come in on David's tree, the girls and I will stand under it and gorge on sun-warmed fruit, laughing and leaning way over so the juice drips onto the lawn. When it's too hot to be inside the house at eight o'clock, we will take our dinner plates out in the front yard. When school's out, there will be sleepovers with giggling far too late into the night. There will be at least one summer car trip featuring back-seat bickering, badly folded maps, and kerchiefs dipped in the cooler's melted ice water in place of air conditioning.

There will be lots of ripe juicy summer for my children, watermelon summer, cherrys $3 a bskt summer. There will be things of their own, to remember.

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