Fasting ice cream and other creamy memories

Some might think from the title of this blog that it is about some kind of Mormon lent, but indeed that would be incorrect.  On a recent Friday we went out with our good friends Stacey and Bryan.  She has gone without ice cream for 13 months!  She had their last baby 13 months ago and due to his allergy to milk products she has had to stop eating ice cream among other things.  But their baby is maturing and he can handle it now so we were able to go out with them to enjoy her first ice cream in a long while. 

That got me to thinking about how we are in middle class society today.  We don't have a lot of money to buy whatever but we do have some discretionary money that we can buy ice cream or something else if we prefer.  We can buy ice cream almost as often as we would like.  Is that a good thing or a not?  Of course we like ice cream and it tastes good, but are we spoiled with the ability to get it to easily?  We should feel grateful that we can obtain a treat that we enjoy so relatively easy.

It reminds me of when I was a missionary in Thailand.  One small town I served in didn't have any ice cream available at all.  Maybe the town hadn't become westernized enough that anyone would buy it.  At any rate we wished we could find some ice cream because of the constant hot weather.  We checked every possible place but had no luck.  Indeed our refrigerator wasn't even cool enough to keep it hard so even if we found it we would have to buy it and eat it on the spot because the refrigeration was poor.  One day while we were out on our bicycles we saw a Foremost ice cream truck driving through town so we decided to follow it thinking that we would find a place to purchase the ice cream.  It drove right through town and didn't stop anywhere!  We were fairly quick on our bikes and realized that in order to get some ice cream we would have to chase the truck down and purchase it directly from the driver.  So naturally being young and starved for ice cream we did chase the truck down and with a little encouragement the driver sold us some ice cream which we ate on the spot. 

Now that you've heard my great Thai ice cream story you probably have one question: where did we get spoons.  In Thailand, much of the food is eaten with your hands.  We were young and creative so we didn't let a little matter of being spoon less keep us from enjoying such a great treat!  Enough said.

So even though we like certain things to eat we can certainly do without them when we must.  In the above examples when we must do something for our children or to serve the Lord we can manage the sacrifice rather easily.

I come by enjoying ice cream honestly since my dad was an ice cream lover.  He loved chocolate ice cream.  Of course he lived through the depression and didn't have much of what he wanted to eat in his young years  I think to him it was a real status thing to have ice cream in the freezer at all times.  Now that I think of it [my Dad was once an ice delivery man for people's ice boxes] it could be that he enjoyed having a freezer in the home that didn't need new ice put in it regularly.  He was accustomed to eating rather large bowls of ice cream whenever he wanted one in the evening. 

All that comes together with our friends Stacey and Bryan.  We were at the ice cream shop (which had just opened up in our town by-the-way) and I enjoyed my ice cream, but I enjoyed watching Stacey enjoy her ice cream even more.

 [As I write this I remember a good friend who had to stop eating ice cream due to health concerns of his own.  Sometimes after work he would offer to take a co-worker to the local ice-cream shop and purchase a sundae for them.  They would often take him up on that offer.  He just liked to watch them enjoy their ice cream because he couldn't anymore.]



How about this for a new slogan:  "Ice cream, the treat that cools the savage beast as well as your loving Mom."