We have sun, a bright sun. I almost didn’t recognize it. We also have a blue sky. It is in the low 50’s. It is a pretty day. Today is a spring day. UPDATE: The ubiquitous clouds are back!

My father used to work for an ice cream company. He became the manager in Hyannis which brought us down here. When I was a kid, he’d bring home ice cream. Once he brought home a few pints, and my sister thought the pints, being so small, were ice cream for her dolls. A couple of times my father gave out Hoodsies on Halloween. What I remember the most was the dry ice. It was in a padded box with the ice cream to keep it frozen. My father would dump the dry ice into the sink and turn the water on. A cloud would form over the sink. It was almost like magic.

When I first went to school, I was afraid of the nuns. They wore black and white and were pretty much covered from the tops of their heads to their ankles. Only their faces and hands were visible. They swished when they walked, and the beads around their waists made clicking noises. When I was older, I came to think of the bead noise as an early warning system. The nuns were coming. Look innocent. The last thing anyone of us wanted was to be a target for their wrath. I don’t remember when they stopped scaring me.

One of my favorite places when I was growing up was O’Grady’s Diner. It was at the bottom edge of uptown. It had booths with red seats and stools at the counter, also with red seats. Each booth had a connection to the jukebox. The connection was a small box, almost a mini jukebox, with a coin slot on the silver top and pages of songs behind glass. You could turn the pages from the top to see all the songs, three songs for a quarter. Sometimes you had to wait to hear your song because it was in a line of songs, sort of a chronological list. Some Saturdays my father would take me to O’Grady’s for breakfast. He’d give me a quarter for the music. We both usually had bacon, eggs and toast. He had coffee. I had juice. Later, when I was in my teens, my friends and I sometimes went to O’Grady’s after drill practice. We always ordered brownies with vanilla ice cream. O’Grady’s is gone now. Where it stood is a hardware store.

This entry was posted on May 2, 2024 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.