Bubble Gum Ice Cream

   When I was little my mom liked to drive her car with an opened can of cold sweaty beer in her center console.  My three year old brother, Jay, would always be begging for a taste and I always wondered what they liked about it. That was the summer I caught a bucket of tadpoles in a far off gutter near an underpass by a freeway.  The winter before is when I got my first Cabbage-Patch Doll for Christmas. She had brown yarn pigtails, painted blue eyes, and a tattoo on her pinkish blushed bottom. Often times I would set my eye glasses on top her head when I’d lay down for the night. Right before sleep I would count the tadpoles swimming around in my gallon sized ice cream bucket. Over a period of couple of weeks I noticed there were fewer and fewer tadpoles. My mom never told me they would grow legs and eventually jump out of the water. Months later I found a couple of them little frogs dried up on the carpet in the back corner of my bedroom closet.  I felt sad, but I felt sad for a few things; my mom and dad had split up. I mostly lived with my dad, but I would stay weekends with my mom. She liked to party with her weirdly wild younger friends. She thought it was okay to let a couple of them watch me and my brother for a day. They smelled badly and talked too slow, and they often laughed over things that weren’t funny at all.  Mostly that day I watched T.V. wrapped up in a cozy blanket on a parsley brown couch in a squared off living room. It was raining and I missed my mom.  Late in the evening, and to my utter horror, she asked those friends of hers to bring us to where she was staying. I was young, but I old enough to know her friends had no business driving us in a car. I began to panic over what I should do, and without warning they were scooting me and my little brother out to the drive. To their surprise they could tell I was not happy. Just getting in reverse was a challenge for them. I started to cry, so they got this bright idea to buy me and my brother ice cream. The market was diagonally across a four lane road. I braced myself and started asking god if he was real. After a shaky start they punched the petal and squealed the wheels. We only swerved a couple of times before making a shaky turn into the parking lot. My brother picked a chocolate dipped ice cream cone and I chose a pink colored ice cream with gum chunks scooped into a cup. I had no appetite. I only knew I was going to chew it up and pretend to throw up in their car.  We didn’t go far after that, in fact they called my mom and took us back to the our house across the street. I will never forget the day bubble gum ice cream was best thing I got that year.