Chinese Version09-10-2024，Tuesday, Sunny
Tonight, I closed my door, sat in my room and watched the 2024 presidential debate live.
When my daughter’s family of four came home from a walk, I heard my grandson Ben running towards my room, standing outside the door, and calling “Grandma, Grandma”. I opened the door, and Ben ran into my room with two colorful plastic spoons in one hand and a Super Mario Princess Peach plush doll in the other.
The live debate ended quickly.
While walking Ben to the dining room for his dinner, I asked him: “Who bought you the spoons?” “Mom.” I asked my daughter: “You guys went shopping tonight?” My daughter replied: “No, we went for ice cream, and the spoons were from the ice cream.” I couldn’t help but sigh: “Wow, eating ice cream so late.”
Because he ate ice cream, Ben had no appetite for dinner.
After a while, Ben’s friend Mateo and his father along with his younger brother came over to watch Pikachu on the TV together. No one mentioned tonight’s debate. It seems that parents with young children don’t have time to listen to the 90-minute debate.
I went back to my room and thought about how Ben, who was just over two years old, liked ice cream as much as his mother did，which made me remember a memory about her moving from the East Coast to California. In early 1997, in cold West Virginia, I told my three-year-old daughter who loved ice cream: “We are moving to California where we can eat ice cream in the winter.” After hearing this, she longed for California.
More people and scenes of eating ice cream slowly emerged in my mind.
A long time ago, I enrolled in an adult night school in California. During the first class, the instructor asked students to share about their favorite food. The girl in front of me said: “I like ice cream the most.” I followed up with: “I don’t like ice cream because I don’t like cold food. I like rice the most.” After hearing what I said, the girl turned towards me, opened her eyes widely and said in a surprising tone: “Wow, there are people who don’t like ice cream.” When talking about their favorite food, even adults are easily excited. The rest of the classroom was also excited on that day.
In 2016, I sent my daughter to Wurzburg Germany for graduate school, we had a chance to chat while savoring a plate of light yellow ice cream, and I talked about the light yellow ice cream made by my mother in 1982. That year, I was a sophomore in Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu. My mother wrote to me and said that our family bought a Changqing single-door refrigerator. She learned how to make ice cream and made a big jar of ice cream waiting for me to come home to eat during my summer vacation. The memories awakened by the food are vivid. I remember my mother who doesn’t like sweets watching me eat her ice cream with a long lasting smile, in our dining room on Fort Hill, in the hot summer without air conditioning in Zigong. It was a pleasant thing to eat ice cream in summer when I was young!
However, I recently heard an unpleasant story about eating ice cream. A grandma who likes to wear flowery clothes just like me flew to the East Coast this summer to visit her son, daughter-in-law, and grandsons. She originally planned to stay for a week, but the ice cream caused trouble and she only stayed for three days. She and her son’s family of four went to an ice cream shop and she ordered a large size of chocolate ice cream for herself, because she liked sweets very much. She shared some of her ice cream with her grandson, because the boy wanted to try everyone’s. After returning home, the grandma went to the bathroom and noticed from the mirror that there was a line of brown left by the chocolate ice cream on her flowery clothes, which is one of her favorites. She suddenly got angry, felt that her son and daughter-in-law did not take her seriously because they did not point out that her clothes were soiled in the store, which showed that they are tired of her now, so she left early. This story made me want to step into the case, because the grandma said that her son did not know that she left because of the ice cream stain.
I thought about her story again tonight, thinking about our two-year-old Ben who is quick and full of ideas, and someone always has to pay a good attention to him when he goes out; thinking about my daughter, son-in-law and the young parents of our neighbor who have no time to care about tonight’s presidential debate, I guess the son and daughter-in-law in that situation were too busy taking care of two children who probably like ice cream and might not have noticed her problem. I think I will not make the same mistake as the grandma now. Also I think listening to this kind of gossip is beneficial. First, I can be a bystander and comment on it without suffering, and second, I can step into the case to think about and understand the problem more deeply.
In 2016, I sent my daughter to Wurzburg Germany for graduate study. I chatted with her while sipping a light yellow ice cream, a long lasting memory.