Liza Blue

My father was a modest man who hated ostentation.  His only source of self-indulgence was his passion for antique cars. Based on old family movies from the 1960s, an antique Ford with a rumble seat was the perfect winter vehicle to pull toboggans filled with neighborhood kids around our circular driveway. After our family outgrew tobogganing he sold his antique car. It was too showy to joy ride around town where people would gawk at him in his open-air car or ask him to toot his horn. Instead he turned to collecting very realistic cast iron models ordered from specialty catalogs. The cars overflowed the shelves in his bedroom, family room and office. After he died, my four brothers and I randomly split up the cars so that we would each have a representative sample.

Only later when I sorted them out did I realize I had acquired an anatomically correct Good Humor ice cream truck, including tiny latches on the freezer compartments and little bells on the windshield.

This car puzzled me since an ice cream truck was not an antique and Dad would never have driven one anyway. Then I remembered years earlier standing next to him on our driveway looking across the way to the neighbor’s house. It was a warm summer evening; freshly mown grass scented the air. The Reed’s had a nubbly gravel driveway which made a homey crunching noise as cars drove in. We heard the crunch followed by the tell-tale bells of a Good Humor truck.

Of all the cars in Dad’s collection, the Good Humor truck was probably the only one I had any direct connection to – I had no knowledge of the classic Dusenbergs, Reos, Packards and Bentleys that so excited him.  In our household, Good Humor bars were considered the height of indulgence, but only if you stumbled upon the truck at the beach or the park.  In Dad’s odd rationalization, a Good Humor man who made house calls to stockpile a freezer, well that was ostentatious, pure and simple. Someone might see the Good Humor truck in our driveway, and then what would people think, that we were too good for store-bought ice cream? My father and I stood quietly at the edge of our lawn as Mrs. Reed took boxes and boxes into her basement.

I wanted to tell him I didn’t care about Good Humors; store-bought ice cream was fine with me. Besides the Reeds always got the inferior flavors of strawberry shortcake or toasted almond rather than the chocolate fudge cake I preferred. Mrs. Reed waved as the Good Humor man drove out the driveway and turned left.  He knew better than to take a right turn into our driveway.