Sunday, December 02, 2007
À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU
I have a standard snack where I pile a layer of vanilla no-fat yogurt under a layer of double chocolate.
Every time I lick the chocolate spoon I get a kind of misty memory from childhood.
It is fogged somehow. I don't get it.
I don't have other memories like that.
I remember a time when I had the taste of chocolate in my mouth.
At Dick Roach's birthday party when I was 4. Next door. I got some chocolate ice cream on my shirt and just had to let my mother know (who didn't come because she couldn't stand Dick Roach's mother--they were from Scranton).
I can just hear Ms. Roach muttering "Oh jesus, what's with the little sissy now". I don't know that she muttered that but she conveyed it.
Body language. I was already reading it.
Ms.Roach bellowing from the front porch to my mother next door to come see what had happened.
I still look down at my shirt front after the yogurt is done.
Another image comes of me next to Williams Drug Store. There is a church bizarre. They have ice cream and only chocolate. It is not what I want but I take a cone anyhow.
Not all of these images are painful.
Another time I will be in the back of Ms. Jone's restaurant for an ice cream cone. It is not free but David Bixler and I are a pain in the ass while they are trying to get dinner together so she only gives us chocolate.
Some other times I think of chocolate in a more contemporary mode. The swiss- chocolate-almond-vanilla cones after a Meeting in the, then new and quite exciting, Häagen-Dazs store on Charles Street. Boston.
I never get this kind of thing with any other flavor. Just chocolate.
What is up with that?
I don't think that I will spend most of my life writing about it though.
