ICE CREAM

ICE CREAM 

The evening of January 4, 2015, my wife Patricia and I decided we wanted and deserved an evening date for dessert and coffee. We don’t do this often. We’re on a pretty strict budget, which allows for two generous meals a day at home, augmented by some fruit or something “a little extra” in the evening. The system works for us, mostly because of Patricia’s diligence in choosing and buying food, along with Colombia’s 365 day growing season (you should see the mountains of fruits on market day!) and my recent reduction from gluttonous appetite in days as full time carpenter and construction worker. For 13½ years, I worked on crews building houses for other contractors, then worked evenings and weekends building my own log house in the mountains of northeast Oregon. I lost that house, and the 6¾ timbered acres it sat on, to the bank, just about the time I finished it. Then I’d switch from that, with what energy I had left, to writing my memoir, RATTLESNAKE DREAMS. That took 19 years. Once in a while, I even hooked up with a good woman and convinced her to hang with me for a while. One lasted a whole year; she’s still a friend. (This was some years ago, before Patricia and I met on the internet, and married.) Hey, honest, this story is about ice cream. Stick with me. It travels some interesting ground. The evening of our dessert date, we started at Probocatto, a dessert and coffee place here in Chía, the Colombian town where my wife was born. Her parents still live here. So does with her brother Elvidt and his wife, Myriam. (Remind me to tell you how Elvidt got his name.) Their sister Martha lives much of the year in Ibagué, where she is a professor of language and literature. Ibagué is about three hours by car or bus from here in Chía, where the rest of us live. The night of our date, the ladies in Probocatto were already hoisting chairs onto tables, and the aspirador (vacuum cleaner) was howling through the open door. We walked around the corner to WOK, an Asian restaurant that offers tasty and unusual desserts and good coffee, and stayed open an hour later. Patricia ordered a coconut flan that looked to me so small that if I simply sniffed it, it would disappear into my respiratory system. Nah. I asked for an old favorite which I’d seen only at WOK: three scoops of ice cream, each a different flavor made from fruits grown in the Amazon River basin, the upper part of which is near where we live. A big sugar cookie comes with it. Not with the Amazon River basin; with the ice cream. They brought me a scoop of copoazú, and one each of  arazá and camu camu. One version of the menu has pictures of the fruits on the back, along with their names and brief notes re specific nutritional advantages of each. Apparently the owner/manager wants to give his customers access to foods they don’t normally have access to, and information about those foods. I’ve never met him, but his name seems to be Chinese. The main dishes are from various countries in south and east Asia. The decor is simple, open, and airy. I’m also impressed that the place seems to emphasize species of seafood that are not endangered, and that are raised, caught, or harvested by eco-friendly methods. A favorite aspect of the place, for me, is that restaurant personnel are just normal looking people of several races and skin colors who work hard, ride bicycles to go places, apparently get paid a decent wage, and treat one another with a friendly respect. The photos of people shown on the menus are of people who actually work in the place. Normal folks, not models. Some of them are named. I feel comfort, and a certain sense of relief, moving in a world where not only are people with white skin not the majority, but actually we’re kinda rare. It seems somehow right. It also seems right that a fair number of the people around me have dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. That seems right too. In later chapters, I’ll talk more about race. A lot more. But this story is about ice cream. [I’m going to paste here an excerpt from my memoir, Rattlesnake Dreams, because it fits:] I had read about the Russian Revolution, and had taken some excellent courses in Soviet politics from Professor David Finley at Colorado College. I remember a story he told in class. But to retell it, I have to say something about Russians and ice cream. This goes back to the summer of 1969, which I spent in Leningrad (formerly, and later, St. Petersburg): That summer started one day at CC as class was ending: in this case, second year Russian. Our teacher was Mariamna Soudakova our wonderful and fierce woman whose family had fled Russia when she was a child. I never learned much about her personal life; now I wish I had. But one day as class ended a student asked about her history – politely, of course – and received the answer which included her family escaping to the east, and ending up in China during the 1930s or 40s. We only got that part of the story because Ms. Soudakova, in a joking way, let drop that she had been married in Shanghai with her leg in a cast. I only later learned, through books and history courses, what a tumultuous time and place was China during those years. The main thing I remember about food that summer is that I don’t remember it. Soviet food, to my taste, served to get you through the day, not to make it special. Sort of like English food. But ice cream was a different story. Someone had said that Russians made a lot of ice cream because, while their milk production was high, their ability to keep liquid milk refrigerated lagged behind their ability to keep it frozen. Possibly because for half the year, at least in a place so far north as Leningrad, little energy was required to keep anything frozen. Russians famously loved their ice cream, and with reason: it was wonderful. Our favorite treat that summer – mine, anyway – was a champagne float from one of the shops along Nevsky Prospekt. The champagne was good, too. Anyway, Professor Finley’s story went like this. He began by telling of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 at the head of half a million soldiers. The Russian General Kutuzov, knowing better than to tackle the behemoth army head-on, kept pulling back and harassing Napoleon’s flanks, using up the summer, abandoning Moscow. By mid-October, Napoleon had to leave with nothing to show for his invasion except a great city with no people. The Russian winter, and Kutuzov’s army, whittled Napoleon’s army to ten thousand survivors, and ended his reign in Europe. That was the preamble to his story about Churchill and Stalin. It seems that at the bleakest point in the battle on Germany’s Eastern Front, when Stalingrad was in danger of falling to the German Army, the two leaders were in Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, overlooking Red Square. They were glumly discussing the bleak prospects of holding Stalingrad, which, if it fell, would loose the German army’s tanks into the Russian heartland, threatening the entire Allied war effort. They were looking out Stalin’s office window at a snowy mid-winter scene in Red Square. There were two long lines of people in the square, bundled against the cold. “What are those people waiting in line for?” Churchill asked. “Well, the shorter line is people waiting to go through Lenin’s tomb,” Stalin replied. (In 1969, it was still there in Red Square, tucked close to the Kremlin Wall. Lenin’s head and shrunken body were on visible display – the body covered by a silk drape - in a sealed glass case, which we and other visitors filed past.) “And the longer line? What are they waiting for?” “Ice cream,” Stalin replied. Churchill was stunned. “Ice cream?” “Ice cream. We Russians love our ice cream.” Churchill pondered that a long moment, then said, “If those people are waiting in that cold for ice cream, Hitler doesn’t have a chance.” And so it was.