Those Creative Types

I don’t have a cat that I could blame for dying.  I didn’t get talent spotted for the next NASA mission to outerspace (although if you’re reading this, NASA chiefs, I could do December).  Nor have I recently lost my memory of my entire life (that really happens, I saw it in a documentary), including the fact that I have a blog.

Much better than that.

Fellas, I got engaged.  There’s a ring and everything.  And can I just say that I now see the point of engagement rings.  Not only is a ring a useful prop (read: proof) when you tell your disbelieving friends, it also serves as a constant reminder to you and your affianced that 1. he asked, and 2. you said yes. 

I have a single distinct memory of being four years old, and naturally it involves food.  I was in Centrepoint shopping centre, the indoor mall of Woodridge.  At that time the shopping centre boasted a Coles and a Best and Less, a Wallace Bishop and a Dick Smith’s, and a pet shop that always smelt of hay and cute puppies.  There was also an ice-cream vendor in Centrepoint, and sometimes, if I had been really good, my mum would get me a tutti-frutti ice-cream, which I loved because it had all the colours (even at the age of four, I liked value for money).

On one such shopping trip, I had been very, very good, not squabbling with my sister a single time.  Mum stopped in front of the ice-cream store and I pressed my nose against the glass right in front of that rainbow miasma, the curled and creamy, the one and only, the giant tub of tutti frutti ice-cream, filling my peripheral vision.

“Cone or cup?”  the ice-cream girl asked.  She was wearing a lime-green, pink-trimmed apron, just like my soon-to-be, only it also had blue, and orange, and even yellow in its spectrum.  

I looked hopefully at my mum.  ”Cone?” I asked.  She nodded and before I knew it, I had an orange wafer cone clasped in my two hands, topped with a ball of tutti-frutti ice-cream.  

“Don’t drop it,” mum warned and I carefully stared at the ball of delight, licking as quickly as I could to stop it from melting in the tepid air-conditioning (if you’re from Brisbane, you’ll know how summer pooh poohs human attempts at cooling the air).  I advanced slowly down the mall, the sights of the shops around me fading to a mere patter of background brightness.  

Suddenly, without warning, the ice-cream scoop plopped to the ground.  I stood rooted to the spot, staring at the bright colours oozing into liquid mush, then dirt mixing with it, a stickiness where once there had been pure, unadulterated joy.  The vacuum cleaner demonstrator stationed a few steps ahead of me glanced over and tut-tutted, then went back to picking up a bowling ball with nothing but hot air.  

My mum turned around and spotted me and then she looked down and spotted the ice-cream.  ”C’mon, Jackie,” she said, thankfully seeing I had been punished enough by the loss and not scolding me for clumsiness.  She paused for a second, probably wondering if she could go back and ask the shop for another scoop, but she must have decided that it would meet the same fate anyway.  ”Got to leave it now.”

For a second I wondered if maybe I could scoop it off the ground; that perhaps it was still salvagable, and I could go on as before (perhaps a bit grittier but still, my one, my only).  Mum turned around to keep walking.  I still held the cone in my hands.  It had grown soft and mushy, the base beginning to disintegrate into wet crumbs sticking to my palms where the last tracks of tutti frutti now mixed with my lifeline and heartline.  

By the time we made it out of the shops, the feeling of heartbreak which I thought I would never recover from had completely dissipated.  The view from the car  was the most interesting thing I had ever seen.  Mum had cleaned my hands and I could make prints on the window with the moisture.  My feet didn’t touch the ground yet, and so I could kick and wriggle in the car seat to my heart’s content.  

Since then, since I was four years old, I feel like I have spent a lot more of my time and energy holding on to disappointments.  I lost the ease of feeling bitterly sad and then moving on that I had back then.  I have spent months, sometimes years, pondering what I perceived as broken promises made to me by life or other people, and more especially by myself.  Life has not always turned out as I had hoped.  

Last week, my friend asked me to marry him (my one, my only).  I didn’t stop to ask myself what I would do if the ice-cream fell to earth.  I just said yes with everything that makes up me.

I am so happy.  I don’t eat tutti-frutti any more, you know (too sweet for my ageing palate), but I have taken a diet of rainbows for free. 

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.