Ice Cream

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Ice Cream is wonderful. I love it! Is love too strong a word? I hope not. I really do love it. Oh, not the way I love God, my wife, my children, my brothers and sisters in Christ---but I do love it. The Greeks have four words for love: Affection, friendship, eros and charity. But we (those who speak English) use one word to describe this emotion when we are talking about loving God, mother, America or apple pie.

I remember my very first ice cream cone. I was five years old, living in Fletcher, Oklahoma, the flavor was strawberry and my mother bought it at a little drug store.

I remember my last ice cream cone. It was yesterday, in Phoenix, at the McDonalds in the food court at the mall, the flavor was vanilla. There was a time when I didn't think this "stuff" could be called ice cream but I guess it is. Everybody calls it soft ice cream. In my mind it will never rank up there with hard ice cream but I have to admit---it is good.

For years I declared to everybody who was willing to listen that strawberry ice cream was the world's greatest taste. And then one day, I discovered pineapple/coconut and for years I thought that was the best. One day, I don't know when, I discovered that the world's greatest taste was whatever I happened to be eating at the moment.

When Fran Rapacz was working with me at Lincoln Heights Christian Church she came in the office one morning and told me about what she and John (her husband) had done the night before. They stopped at the Baskin Robbins on Tatum Blvd., got two ice cream cones, drove out into the desert under the stars and ate the ice cream. Wow! I thought, "John you are one blessed man. FRAN, ice cream, under the Arizona stars---it doesn't get any better than this."