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.