THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

I had a really good ice-cream cone this week.

I suppose this does not qualify as news, but I try not to eat too much ice cream, and I don’t usually keep ice cream in my freezer because I have a tendency to eat it all right away.

I love ice cream. I have always loved ice cream. But I have noticed my tendency to eat it until my face goes numb and have avoided it. When I’m in Mexico, I walk by an ice-cream shop every night, where I have bought ice cream before. It is good. So almost every night, when I get to the ice-cream shop, I pause, and I ask myself, “Should I get ice cream tonight?”

Almost always, my wiser self says, “You don’t really need ice cream tonight. Maybe tomorrow.” And I don’t buy ice cream.

But last night, after I had passed my usual ice-cream shop, I came to a gelato shop that I had ignored until now. I thought it looked a little fancy. I couldn’t imagine gelato could be as good as the ice cream at the shop I had just passed. But this place was always busy, and tonight, for a change, there was no one in there but two employees standing behind the counter. I wandered in.

I looked for the smallest cone they had, and I said I would like one.

“What flavors?”

“What do you recommend?”

She suggested several and told me I could have up to four.

“On one little cone?”

“Yes!”

This seemed unusual. It was not a large cone. But I went ahead and ordered two kinds of chocolate, one with nuts and one without, and strawberry and mint. While one of the women took my money, the other one started scooping ice cream.

I had no idea it would be such a process.

Tiny slivers of gelato were scooped out in petal shapes and put in that cone, one by one, going around in a circle until the whole thing looked like a rose. It was too beautiful to eat. I had them take a picture of me with the cone first. But I had to eat it eventually because the petals were hanging over the edges of the cone like the fully opened rose it resembled, and it would not be an exaggeration to say it was the best ice-cream cone I have ever had.

And now I wonder why I waited so long.

I try to eat good things. My reasoning is that nothing I possess is more important than my body, and I want to keep it in working order. So I generally eat well and that is usually pretty easy because I love vegetables more than anything.

But life requires more than vegetables. That’s what I was thinking while eating my exquisite little ice-cream cone.

I vowed that from now on, I will eat ice cream that is worth eating. And I realized that this was no different from reading books that were worth reading, wearing clothes I loved to wear, and spending time with people who lit me up instead of pulling me down.

All of it was a choice about how to spend my time and attention, and all of it started with believing that life was too short to eat bad ice cream, and certainly too short not to eat ice cream at all.

I’m having vegetables again today, and I’ll have vegetables tomorrow. But there is also a chance that I will have ice cream tonight.

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