Dishing out the Memories
By Jamie Gronski
Cape Cod Times, June 11, 2007

He was the son of hard-working Czech immigrant farmers. In the summer,
when I weeded his garden until my fingers were stained green, he
rewarded me with a quarter. He was a mechanical engineer for the
government who saw only in black and white. It showed when we debated
incessantly. We couldn't even agree to disagree. But my grandfather, the
man I called Pop-Pop, wasn't only thrifty and rigid. He had a sense of
humor about him. He had ways to get under people's skin with only the
best intentions.


Pop-Pop loved ice cream. My grandmother would serve him a big dish of
the stuff every evening. He would stretch out in his leather recliner,
watch TV and look at her with wide eyes and a devilish grin, the same
one that stretched across his face in the photos of his youth.


"What flavor do we have tonight?" he'd tease. Or, he'd say with a pout,
"I was in the mood for rocky road."


"Hush up and eat what's in front of you," my grandmother would snap
back. We would all sit there together, spooning ice cream from dish to
mouth.


And then Pop-Pop would start up. I'm sure he was one of those little
kids who got in trouble for licking their bowl. Now he just scraped up
every last drop with his spoon, so he could savor it all until his dish
was dry. And it wasn't just a few scrapes. Pop-Pop would gluttonously
clink and clink and clink his metal spoon against the glass dish,
glancing out of the corner of his eye at us.


At first, my grandmother would ignore it. But he was relentless,
scraping when there wasn't another drop to savor. Pop-Pop's smile would
grow as my grandmother's blood pressure rose. Finally, she'd give in.


"Damn it, Charlie," she'd cry out, "You're such a tease!" She'd pretend
to be annoyed; he'd pretend to accept his scolding. We'd all laugh at
Pop-Pop's sense of humor. It was a lovely ritual.


There was no room for frozen vegetables and meat fillets in my
grandmother's freezer. The space was reserved for pistachio, rum raisin,
harlequin and orange sorbet. When my grandfather was dying from cancer,
the ice cream stash dwindled. When he died, the freezer was empty.


I visited my grandmother regularly after his death. One of the first
things I'd do when I'd walk into her kitchen was pop my head in the
fridge. I'd nose around for treats.  There was never ice cream, only
frozen spinach and chicken breasts.


A year after Pop-Pop was gone, I moved into my grandmother's house. That
night, we went grocery shopping together. As we made our rounds in the
frozen-foods aisle, she asked me if I wanted any treats. I rolled our
shopping cart to a stop in front of the ice cream case.


"What flavor," I asked her. She paused.  Then, wordlessly, she pulled a
half gallon of mint chocolate chip out of the case. In silence, we made
our way to the checkout line.


After dinner that night, we watched TV in the den. We sat together on
the couch, next to the empty leather recliner.


"What's for dessert," I asked my grandmother. She went to the kitchen
and came back with two dishes filled with mint chocolate chip.


We ate our ice cream in silence. She finished first and put her empty
dish down on the coffee table.


With my spoon, I started to scrape away at my empty ice cream dish. It
was a sound that neither of us had heard for more than a year. It was a
sound we loved to hate, a sound that made us laugh until we had tears in
our eyes.


My grandmother looked over at me. Her face was so stern, my spoon-clad
hand froze, midscrape. Then she smiled. Her grin grew wide, like the one
Pop-Pop used to have, and she started to laugh. We both laughed, deep
laughs, from our bellies. Finally, tears came to our eyes.


It was OK to eat ice cream again. Five years later, we still eat it. And
every once in a while, one of us will clink clink clink her dish just to
keep the memory alive.

Copyright, 2007, Cape Cod Times. All Rights Reserved.