I scream!

I love summer.

I mean, I LOVE summer.

It is very early May in Austin, Texas, and by the northern standards I still seem to use, it's already summer: warm, sunny, glorious. People are out in shorts, kids are swimming. Life is good.

It's Sunday afternoon, I'm lounging in bed, half-asleep, listening to the radio. My oldest girl is watching a streaming movie from Netflix, my youngest watching along. A perfectly quiet, indolent Sunday afternoon.

Suddenly terrified shrieks fill the air: Daddy, Daddy, DADDY!!!!! The tone is frantic, panicked, like when Something Really Bad happens. I envision broken bones, severed limbs... arterial spray. Leaping out of bed, I run into the game room where my two lovelies were just a moment ago: they're gone, vanished! How could it be? they were just there, I heard their terrified yells. Then, from outside, I hear another plaintive cry: "I scream, I scream", or was it "ice cream, ice cream"?

I look out the window just in time to see the two of them flying down the street, headed toward the ice cream truck strategically parked by the community pool. They end up toward the back of the gaggle of impatient kids straining to glimpse the board loudly displaying the dizzying array of options to choose from, one sugar and artificial-everything laced item more delicious than the next. A middle-aged man, for whom the preciousness of the moment is somewhat diminished by having spend much of his adult life dispensing ice cream to crowds of kids, is doing exactly that, once more, with the enthusiasm of a TxDOT worker at the end of a long day. I notice what looks like a prison-tattoo on his hand, perhaps the inked reminder of a misspent youth. My kids don't notice, they wouldn't care if they did, it's ICE CREAM.

Not just any ice cream, mind you, not the boring Breyer's all-natural stuff, not Blue Bunny or HEB-store-brand, not even the Hagen-Daaz ice cream we sometimes get, and completely unlike the three or four kinds of ice cream or popsicles in our freezer. No, this is ice-cream-truck ice cream, that most treasured, precious and delicious treat. The stuff over which wars could be fought, fortunes or nations lost and be worth it. My oldest gets some kind of chocolate ice cream, the youngest some fluorescent-colored snow-cone thing.

The sheer delight of the moment, the pure joy of sugar and summer radiates from their faces, raw, unfiltered, untempered by any perspective or experience. They don't know how fleeting the moment is, how ultimately food won't really make them happy, how one needs a job to pay for the ice cream.

They don't give a care, it's summer, it's ice cream, and they are happy.

I love summer.