Start with vanilla ice-cream. In your typical sugar cone. Covered in
rainbow sprinkles and seemingly melting at tongue’s first touch. The Dairy Bar, only open during the year’s warmer months, is brimming with many of its typical visitors. There are families, couples and friends. And then there was us. And we didn't know what this vanilla ice-cream really was.
    It’s September, it appears that all of Glenview is out for the night. Talk about the street lights. How they appear to match the shade of the September sky. Each passing car bringing its own discrete flicker of light. Even the stopping train seeming only visible for a moment of time. Only a few select stores remain open at this hour, the prattle of the people more apparent than any given light.
Icecream. Tastes of an apparent opportunity. Like a new beginning. Like finding a new job, hoping it’ll be the one to make a career out of. How does this even relate, you ask. I've seen it in both of my parents that they made a career out what they have done. You know those accountants, how they had always been the nerdy ones around school, more engaged with what was going on in school than out. They have dedicated their lives to this “bean counting” (as my mother always says), they simply do it for different reasons. My mother simply wishes to occupy time, and avoid becoming what she has seen in her mother.
Had this been a date, I think carefully to myself. Which means I knew I must have liked her. I had hoped she had felt the same way. I’ll have to wait and see what this night would become. I would see if she wanted to come over after. My parents had now been home, trying to figure out why the TV would not work for them again - silly accountants. Both siblings being away, the house seemed inviting to its newly welcomed guest. We wouldn’t be here too long. I wondered what to do, what to say, and who to be.
Don’t forget the sprinkles. How they appeared to rest ever so gently upon the cone. They seemed to be what tied the cone together. Partially there for taste, more evidently for the added appearance. This ice cream had now been long gone, and it appears the night as well may soon be over. It was getting late, and I would be driving her home. I already wondered what her parents would think of me. I started to think of the other cars that had been on the road. Who they were with, how they had met, what their story would be. I wondered about my own story. The part about the first time, at the Dairy Bar obviously. The part that everyone would come to know.
The night had come to end. What would others think of this, I wonder. People always seemed to have way to find out about things like this. And although it had started as just vanilla ice cream, was it really only icecream? She had met your parents… It must have been a date. I smiled, thinking back about how it had been at the time. It really hadn’t been that long, but how it had changed. The ice cream had been the job as it now becomes a career. There -- I look back, at how this day had even come about. How the vanilla ice cream had taken us to where we now are. And how my simple questions had begun to be answered