“Why, it’s an outrage.
That’s disgraceful,” sniffed Nelda Isselfrick as she eyeballed
the new sign Hooter and Izzy had hoisted over the top of Fred
Finnegan’s gleaming, mobile ice cream wagon.
Emblazoned across the shiny white paint in bright red letters:
“The Chilled Udder.” Then in smaller, blue letters, “Frosty
TrEATS for Warm Hands!” As the name implied, there was also an
admirably rendered silhouette of a cow’s udder, with teats that
were more like icicles.
“You got to have a sense of humor,” grinned Hooter. “This here
is what you call a solution. Except for them of us that know
about Fred’s Dairy Bar (what the replaced sign had read), he
isn’t getting much business. If he doesn’t get enough business,
he’ll be moving on to set up somewhere else. He does that, and
none of us get to enjoy the homemade ice cream. That includes
you.”
“Well, I never,” said Nelda teetering toward the post office,
licking daintily at the daily delight—almond-vanilla-mocha—she’d
just purchased.
Freed Enterprise
“I used to work the wheat harvest back in the day. Drove a
combine and did some mechanicin’. That’s what gave me the idea
for a seasonal business that can be open longer than the
season,” Fred had explained to Hooter when he first rolled into
town. “Depending on the year, it already feels like summertime
in April around here. By the time the novelty wears off, it’s
getting hotter farther north and so on. Then it’s just the
reverse heading into September and October, so I start the
reverse migration. By then, the places I was during the first
part of the season are ready for another taste.”
Rather than parking
his rig around larger cities and towns, Fred learned there was
more business in a smaller town, especially if it was located
along a decently traveled highway. The license and inspection
requirements were usually less intense, and it was cheaper and
easier to find a place to set his trailer.
Fred figured Apache
Flats was a perfect spot. It was, too, for about six weeks. Then
the state highway department tore up a stretch of road about 10
miles away, detouring folks for about three miles and five
minutes. The detour led back to the main road, but once
folks—most of them frequent travelers between Childress and
Lubbock—knew about the construction, they took a different route
altogether.
That’s why Hooter
figured some innovative advertising might capture more of the
folks still using the highway. He had plenty of civic backing,
too, since once you had tried Fred Finnegan’s ice cream, you
wanted more. That’s especially true of the devotion surrounding
Fred’s original Pickle Pops. These salty-sweet confections start
with a pickle that is surely something between a straight-bred
dill and a bread-and-butter variety.
Chocolate and
peanut butter cover the pickle, followed by what seems to be
Fred’s own extra-vanilla ice cream. This in turn is bathed in
another coat of chocolate.
“I know, it sounds
terrible, but it’s the next best thing since mama’s milk, trust
me,” Hooter had told his cousin, Charlie, encouraging him to try
a bite the first time. The second required no arm twisting.
Other places, you
might see a line for drive-thru donuts, or coffee and sandwiches
at a fast food outfit. Since Fred came to town, what you saw in
Apache Flats was a line of folks yammering for Pickle Pops. Fred
only made so many each night for the next day; get them quick or
you didn’t.
“Why don’t you make more of ‘em?” wondered Hooter early on.
“It’s plain you could sell them. For that matter, why don’t you
go big-time, become the next ice cream conglomerate?”
Fred had leaned
across the stainless steel counter, doling out Hooter’s daily
afternoon ice cream fix and said simply, “It’s awful hard to run
out of demand as long as folks want more than you have.”
“Well, then, what
about a franchise deal? Like supposing when you decide to hit
the road, you showed me how to do that stuff and I could keep
the wheels rolling until you come back through,” wondered
Hooter.
“It wouldn’t be the
same.”
“No offense, Fred,
and I’m not saying there isn’t some kind of art to this, but
surely someone could come close if they tried hard enough.”
“Oh they could.
They could probably duplicate the taste exactly, but it wouldn’t
be the same.”
“But…”
“Next!” hollered
Fred with a smile, though there was no one behind Hooter.
Chilled Reality
Between slowing traffic and increasing summer temperatures
further north, the inevitable morning arrived when the Pickle
Pop crowd made an early morning run to town only to find that
Fred and his treats were gone. He’d left the sign, though, with
a note tacked to it: “Thanks for everything. See you on the
flip-flop.”
It wouldn’t be a
stretch to say the town entered a time of mourning for something
lost that they knew from the beginning they could never
keep—like a winning streak or puppy love.
Hooter seemed to be the most dejected of all. It wasn’t just
losing the Chilled Udder’s frozen delicacies; it was that he
still couldn’t figure out why Fred hadn’t explained why the same
taste couldn’t be reproduced by anyone else.
Fred was right,
though. Ever since the itinerant ice cream vendor left, Hooter
had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to duplicate the
Pickle Pop. Aunt Pinky had even agreed to help him, though she
never seemed especially enamored with Fred’s place or products.
She sensed there was something more than a secret recipe
troubling her nephew, though.
So, there they
were, like sticky prey surrounded by jars of pickles,
hand-crank-freezers dripping with promise, jugs of chocolate
syrup and a pail of peanut butter.
“It’s so close, but
that’s still not it,” grumped Hooter tossing another prototype
into the sink after barely taking a nibble. “It can’t be that
hard.”
“It may be harder
than you think,” said Pinky, dipping another pickle into another
dish. “Best as I can tell, the ice cream wasn’t what made that
place so popular.”
“Huh?”
“You looked forward
to going in there every day, but sometimes Fred was already out
of what you went for, but you didn’t just turn around and come
back, did you?”
“Of course not, I’d
already made the trip, so I’d get something else,” said Hooter
with a certain amount of defiance. He figured his aunt thought
his trips to town for ice cream were a frivolous luxury.
“And, you’d stick
around to eat it and visit with Fred and whoever else came by.”
“I didn’t want it
to melt before I got home.” Hooter was starting to feel like he
was on trial.
“You were going
there for more than ice cream,” said Aunt Pinky. “You were going
there for a moment that appealed to you and the other folks who
went, a moment they couldn’t get anywhere else.”
Hooter hadn’t
bargained for an exercise in existentialism, with his aunt
nonetheless.
“Where your theory
starts leaking sense is the fact that the only folks I ever saw
up there were the same ones I see and talk to everywhere else,
at the feed store, the school, a meeting.”
“That’s the point.
Everybody sees everybody when there’s something that needs to be
done. Folks showed up at Fred’s for enjoyment, period. It wasn’t
anything they had to do; it’s something they wanted to do. The
ice cream was just the excuse.”
“Well it’s not like
we were breaking the law,” said Hooter, still feeling like his
aunt was trying to corner him.
“Look, there’s no
way your pickle pops can be the same as those you got at Fred’s
because the experience isn’t the same unless you’re looking
forward to going to Fred’s to get them.”
Hooter was starting
to think a couple of monkeys had slipped out of his aunt’s
barrel.
“Fred was smart
enough to know that, and smart enough to realize that he’d be
hard-pressed to get you to understand it,” said Aunt Pinky.
“Huh?”
“Hooter. You and
Charlie could make more money doing lots of other things besides
chasing cows.”
“Yeah. What’s your
point?”
“You do what you do
because doing it is worth more to you than the money you could
be making doing something else. Hobbies turn into livelihoods
when they become jobs. It’s not a job, it’s your life.”
“I’m with you so
far.”
“Looking forward to
something is a big part of life’s enjoyment,” said Aunt Pinky.
“The moments are the destinations in life. Enjoy them, look
forward to them but never try to make a substitute for them
because it can’t be done. ” |
