So for a while, off and on, I’ve been buying frozen treats for the family. Fruit juice bars in the past or ice cream sandwiches. I got away from it for a while when we skint, but our income situation has returned to an income situation, and we’re not hemorrhaging money like last year, so I’ve started picking up the frozen treats again, a ten-spot a week during the peak of summer. And although my youngest has made a habit–and, basically, a complete diet–of the ice cream sandwiches in the recent past, I have been the one eating most of them the last week or so.
Last week, on a lark, I bought a box of Drumsticks as well. If you’re not familiar, Drumsticks are ice cream cones with a chocolate and nut covering, akin to the dip you might get at Dairy Queen or other places. However, they’re pretty hard as they’re all frozen and individually wrapped unlike, say, soft serve dipped to order in molten syrup. And I shouldn’t say it was a lark, really, as I’d seen the boxes in the warehouse club freezers and thought about picking up a box for a couple of weeks before I actually did.
But, ah, gentle reader. How each one takes me back, just a little, to 1996.
I was living with my sainted mother in Lemay, Missouri. I lived with her after the university for two and a half years, and it seemed like such a long time. Those were busier days, then, and my perspective on time was that of a young man, where every year was a larger portion of my life than it is today. But now that my boys are on the cusp of leaving me, probably in less than that time frame, it doesn’t seem that long at all.
My mother handled all the shopping, such as it was. Not a lot of fresh produce–some apples and snack fruit, probably–and not a lot of things for home cooking–in addition to not being much of a cook (neither she nor, by her tutelage, me). Also, she worked second shift. The freezer was stocked with frozen things–and she would call the house line every night on her way home from work (she had a cellular phone, gentle reader, in the middle 1990s, in a bag) to ask me if she wanted me to pick up a Taco Bell Big Beef Burrito Supreme on her way home. She ate Taco Bell nightly, and would share the bounty with me if I were home and awake.
My goodness, she and I could eat nothing but junk in those days. I lived on frozen pizzas and Taco Bell and other fast food, and I tried to gain weight and lifted weights, but to no avail. I was eating several thousand calories a day, including weight gain shakes, and nothing. We both were skin bags over bones.
The freezer also has another treat: Drumsticks. The warehouse club was way up in Earth City in those days, an hour away by car, so she was not buying them in bulk, but the freezer almost always had Drumsticks in them. Oh, boy, and did I eat them. What was I doing at the time? Laying out the St. Louis Artesian? Hanging out in the gap between jobs? Playing Gemstone Warrior 3 on America Online? I had two jobs, spent a lot of time at coffee shops and open mike nights, and still somehow had a lot of time to sit in my mother’s (well, my aunt’s) house and eat Drumsticks.
I shall probably look back at this time of my life and say, “Wow, I had a lot of time.” And I spent it eating Drumsticks and feeling, briefly, twenty-four again.
