| rev:text
| - When I was a kid, there were two places my dad would take me for ice cream. One was our neighborhood Thrifty's, which down the road got bought out by Rite-Aid and is just not the same anymore. The other was Baskin-Robbins, which was a few doors down from our old barber's and would be my every-6-weeks post-haircut staple. Whereas with Thrifty's I was all over the map flavor wise, usually ending up with a triple scoop of chocolate, strawberry, and mint chip (don't "dude, that's gross" me - I know you're doing it), with BR I never bothered with 30 other flavors. There was only one: chocolate fudge.
Now, times come and go and my strong ties to BR faded away as I entered adulthood, and when you're living in SF there's superior ice cream to be had, but moving to Phoenix, I chanced upon this BR location last year because I thought of checking out what this Wild Oats store was all about.
It also happened to be a Tuesday, and BR looked like a complete madhouse. But I don't think it's the kids that the parents go there for. Kids are an excuse, and I'm onto these people. Moms and Dads all flock to $1 scoop Tuesdays because THEY want ice cream. Children? Completely tertiary in their motivation. You can see it as Pops demolished half the scoop of rocky road in one bite, while Mom is orgasming taking dainty spoonfuls of her cup of pina colada. Meanwhile, little Joey has smeared blue raspberry all over his $40 GapKids tshirt and Kaitlin's scoop of bubblegum fell off her sugar cone onto her Barbie sneakers and she's completely hysterical, but Mom's in another world right now and isn't paying an iota of attention.
I turned away from this spectacle and went into Wild Oats, motivated and completely ready to get my granola on and be healthy. And then I walked out, paying like $2.50 for a tomato (singular). Back towards my car I went, and the Baskin Robbins carnival was still going strong.
I looked at my tomato.
Fuck it, Baskin Robbins it is. I went in, urgently scanned for the tub of extremely dark brown chocolate fudge, gave a sigh of relief that it was there and not sent to unpopular flavor purgatory, and ordered a scoop on a sugar cone, just like I used to do a quarter-century earlier (holy shit, that's prehistoric).
Now I had no kids in tow. I was making no excuses. I just wanted ice cream. Besides, on this balmy Tuesday night, it was cheaper than my tomato.
I then brought it outside and sat on a bench. And it was just like I remembered, except that I wasn't itchy from just having stepped off a barber's chair. But then again, it was also different, because unfortunately I forgot that when I was a kid, I wasn't lactose intolerant. I brought no Lactaid pills with me today. I wasn't expecting to eat ice cream this evening. It was compltely impulsive. And of course I paid the price afterwards - but for one dollar and 2 minutes of chocolate fudge-induced nostalgia, I'd say it was worth it.
The $2.50 tomato, maybe not so much.
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