For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for July 23, 2017

Are there still ice cream tricycles these days?

Elly buys ice cream for all the little kids. Ironically this is the very thing Elly used to complain about Mrs. Baird doing for her kids. I guess now that Mrs. Baird is dead, Elly has taken over her job.

The last icecream truck I heard was before 2010.

I still see trucks, but when I was a kid and saw one, I’d ask my mom for a quarter so I could get something. Today it’s “Mom, can I have a couple of bucks for a Popsicle”. Hard to see them making it these days.

When I was a kid I wanted to create things with popsicle sticks but my parents never shelled out for me to eat enough popsicles. A few years ago, I saw a beautiful construction made out of popsicle sticks in the recycle room of my apartment building and felt that the kid who made it put too much work in it for it to be destroyed. So I took it home and displayed it on my wall where it still hangs.

Chocolate ice cream? Are you trying to kill Farley, Elly?

I live on the edge of a Northern CA city, just past the city limit, in a fairly urban area…

and I see ice cream vendors several times a week in summer, and some all year round.

 

Two different small trucks and a bicycle come through my little neighborhood on a regular basis.

One truck plays the classic ice cream truck music that sounds like “turkey in the Straw” but not quite.

The other plays an endlessly repeating part of what I’m told is the theme from “The Sting”.

The bicycle, with a much smaller cold box than in the strip above, has only a bicycle bell, which the vendor sounds repeatedly.

Like several tricycle carts I see, it also has a tray with a clear plastic windshield, from which rise tall sticks, tied with bags of Mexican duros and tortilla chips.

And a push cart with ice cream went by my place just today.

 

There are usually a couple of tricycle ice cream carts on the sidewalk downtown, too, especially during the Wednesday Night Farmer’s Market…

and I see these same vendors and others all around town on different days, walking or pedaling miles in the sun or even rain.

So yeah, mobile ice cream vending is alive and well here!

 

The thing is, ice cream bars have gotten really expensive,

and more so from these small vendors, some of whom sell the frozen cartoon characters the kids love, at about $3.50 each.

Were Elly buying them for half a dozen kids plus one for herself to share with Farley,

it would easily cost well over $20.

Lynn’s Notes:

Puns were a favourite punch line. They were untranslatable, however, which made it difficult for my syndicate to sell my work to non-English-speaking countries. I knew that word play limited my sales, but if I could come up with a good pun, I figured it was worth the loss.

The ice cream truck in our neighborhood in Australia plays Greensleeves. I swear, every vendor in America where I lived (Maryland and Arizona) played Popeye the Sailor Man! I ask you, is that really a good song to sell ice cream? LOL!

I thought ice cream was not healthy for dogs!

We have ice cream vendors in our neighbourhood.

We still have those trucks in Canada to this day!!

To the complainers, she didn’t buy Farley’s ice cream from the vendor (her hands are empty at first) it’s likely doggie ice cream which you can buy to keep your pup a bit cooler in the summer months. & Carob can be a safe substitution for chocolate in them.

That brought back memories! In the late ‘40s and ’50s you could get a small cardboard cup of ice cream and a flat wooden spoon to eat it with. I was conditioned like Pavlov’s dog; to this day 70 odd years later; when I hear ice cream truck music, I have an immediate impulse to jump up and run outside with my dime.

Dogs seem to have cast iron stomachs. We had a yellow lab that got down a pan of peanut oil that was cooling on the stove (thankfully it was cool enough by then!) and slurped down most of a quart of it. She was banished from the house as it went through with the predictable results. Of course, she might have suffered brain damage… it is so hard to tell with a Lab!

… and now you know who Farley’s real friend is!

I had a german shepard once that loved ice cream. I used to get him a small vanilla ice cream cone in the summer. He would eat it like a human. lol

Awww. Farley gets one too