Grape Italian Ice

Tonight I went to get Rita's with my Dad, my brother, my sister-in-law, and my perfect 3 year-old nephew, Brian. (My other perfect nephew, Davey, had to stay home because he was being not-so-perfect earlier by throwing a baseball bat at Brian's head in frustration at Brian's 3 year-old pitching abilities. No Rita's for Davey.) Our t-shirt and shorts-clad crew sat clutching our end of summer treats under the bright lights of the red and white awning. The sky was a slate blue dusk, illuminated by what Brian dubbed, the "spooky moon." What a quintessential American scene for my return home after Europe.

Brian likes to "share" his food. That means he forces a little spoonful of his italian ice into your mouth, (dripping most of it onto your shorts), so he can feel justified helping himself to as much of your italian ice as he would like. But every time he would take a spoonful of grape ice out of his little cup, he'd leave some hanging over the side, dripping down over the wax coating. His mother noticed this, as mothers will. So every so often, when he was busy eating my chocolate banana gelati, she would absentmindendly wipe the side of his cup. She also noticed that between all of his "sharing" from our dishes, he was quickly consuming more than a kid-sized amount of pure liquid sugar. So in addition to wiping his cup, she began taking secret scoops of his ice and eating them herself, therby protecting him from sure sugar-frenzy-madness or a stomachache later on.

No one really noticed this act but me, and the way she was doing it, it's like she wasn't even thinking about it herself. But something about those little wipes and bites really touched me. I thought, what would it be like for us if every time we turned around, someone cleaned up our little messes behind our backs? If they secretly ate our gelati when they knew we were about to have too much?

I guess eventually we need to turn into our own mothers. We need to figure out when to wipe, and when to just let it drip; when to eat out of every italian ice dish we can get our hands on, and when to put the plastic spoon down. But for now, Brian's job was just to bounce around, happily slurping slush and dancing to the music in his head, while mom cleaned up the trail of purple left behind.