The Early Years: Selected Works, Part I

In a recent ill-fated attempt to rid myself of the omnifarious crap piled hip-deep in every corner of my room, I stumbled upon some of my old writings from sixth grade. The year was 1996, and I was twelve years old. If memory serves, we were required to archive all our work in a folder, a folder which apparently I've managed not to dispose of in the nine years since. The contents of said folder are, without exception, hilarious. I’ve always felt that kids these days are far smarter than I was at their age, and if these little slices of personal history are any indication, I’ve been right all along. Seriously, my memory of those days is a haze of cartoons and sugary cereal. How is that different from now, you ask? Well, now I don’t have to play little league.

This first excerpt is evidently a haiku. Recently I began scheming to write a book of nonsensical haikus, sell it to a publisher, and get filthy rich. Clearly that seed was planted when I first started bastardizing poetry:

Lion
A lion escaped
From the zoo just this summer
CHOMP! Well, you found him!

The word LATE is emblazoned across the page in thick purple ink, along with the following in red ink of a more customary thickness:
“Very amusing! Remember to write final drafts in blue or black ink. A.”

This was a theme in my time as a public school student; teachers approved of my work but saw fit to mark me down due to the fact that I was always either utterly clueless, or blatantly disregarding the parameters of a given assignment. Remind me to tell you about the time I got both a detention and an ‘A’ for handing in a math project.

Song of the Ice Cream Man

Where I come from, he plays Dick Hyman’s “The Entertainer.” You know the one; every time you hear it you expect to see a guy with a bushy moustache and a straw hat juggling whilst on a unicycle. Me, I picture that, but I also get a ravenous craving for ice cream. My taste buds rise up and rail against the roof of my mouth, as if they were screaming for it.

Around these parts, the Ice Cream Man lures sweet-toothed children not with ragtime, but with some tuneless, ethereal harpsichordic musings that would seem more appropriate to some sort of enchanted forest. Now, the fact that his truck is tooling around town playing a different little ditty is not, in and of itself, an exceptional circumstance. But as I pondered the choice of music, I noticed other incongruities. For one, I have never actually seen this Ice Cream Man, or his freezer on wheels. I think that, if he were to play “The Entertainer” and arouse the ice cream fiend within me, I would not be able to find him. Today, on a stroll across campus, I could have sworn I heard his song coming from the quad. While this would be a brilliant business move on his part, I turned the corner to see a patch of grass completely void of frozen treats, or any evidence thereof. He is everywhere and nowhere; less of an Ice Cream Man than some kind of Ice Cream Fairy. Reinforcing this concept is the fact that he is apparently always open for business. I can hear him in classrooms, cafeterias, and dormitories….he is nearby, but so far remains hidden. I like to believe he inhabits a universe parallel to our own, distributing his wares to similarly spectral children, and that our common love for ice cream has caused some sort of overlap, resulting in the delicate strains I hear.